Phew: we’ve just survived another end of world days

Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s not all the one way we go”, to borrow a phrase describing mildly erratic behaviour from any individual, but last Friday morning as a gang of us squinted at the sky from the windows of Market Street in Galway city, there certainly seemed to be a lot of truth in the old saying.

Nature and the celestial bodies have always fascinated human kind, and despite all the mind boggling advances in technology from smart phones to an internet that links us all across the world, the phenomenon of a solar eclipse last Friday morning, really did capture the attention of a great chunk of humanity.

Eclipses, at their most spectacular, are a rare enough occurrence, although astronomers tell us that they do happen more regularly than we realise but they are seldom as dramatic as the one we had last Friday morning.

Our last ‘big one’ in Ireland was in August 1999, and by the time we witness another close to full eclipse of the sun, we’ll all be 11 years older (if we’re lucky enough) in 2026.

Total solar eclipses only occur at new moon times when the sun, moon and earth align, leading to the shadow of the moon (known as the umbra) blocking out the light of the sun.

The peak of this at any given point on earth only lasts for a couple of minutes but it gives an eerie enough feel to the world and does tend to spark off unusual reactions among our friends in the animal kingdom.

There are countless anecdotes of the birds stopping singing and retreating to the trees, probably a natural reaction to the reduction in light levels that tells them nightfall is on the way.

With the advances in science and knowledge over the past six centuries or so, the explanation for eclipses has gradually moved from the supernatural to the entirely natural, but before that, their occurrence was often taken a bad omen, a portent of something awful about to occur.

In Chinese culture going back to about 2,000 years before the birth of Christ, astrologers were reputed to have been executed for not correctly predicting the arrival of an eclipse.

Apparently the great emperors of China, if they knew in advance of the eclipse, could put in place some protective measures. If not though, they believed that they were in ‘clear and present danger’. Whatever about the emperors being in danger, their astrologers were quite likely to part company with their heads, if the eclipse arrived without any warning.

The real advances in trying to explain the reasons for solar (and lunar) eclipses started to be provided around the early 1600s when German mathematician and astronomer, Johannes Kepler, observed and explained the science and physics behind a total solar eclipse.

A century later in 1715, English astronomer, Edmond Halley – the man who gave his name to Halley’s Comet – predicted in advance the solar eclipse of May 3rd of that year, and was only a few minutes out in his calculations. If only Halley had been around a couple of thousand years earlier, then the lives of many Chinese astrologers would surely have been spared.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.