Yesterday was the date of the 2024 Solar Eclipse (the day I wrote this, anyway: it was a week and a day ago as you’re reading this) and I had the opportunity to go outside for half an hour to watch it happen. Despite my love for celestial events and cool space pictures, I was a bit unprepared for it, since I didn’t have the energy to figure out what glasses were safe to use and then acquire a pair but, since I saw it while at work, there were plenty of people around who were more prepared than I and who were willing to share their glasses, specialty scopes, scrabbled together lenses, and goggles. As much fun as the eclipse was (and I LOVE a Celestial Event), it might have been more fun seeing what all the other nerds in the R&D department I work in came up with to view the eclipse using only the stuff they had around their labs. The very nature of our mutual employer meant that we all had high quality stuff to work with and that a lot of people contributing to these handmade objects actually had the knowledge necessary to make them correctly. Despite a rather high number of cobbled-together viewing devices, not a single person reported being ocularly injured. No one at work here was googling “why do my eyes hurt” like so many other people in the US have been since the eclipse. The ingenuity of all these people–coupled with their willingness to share their knowledge, their crafts, and their company–made an already excellent event even better than I could have expected.

I almost missed a pretty big portion of it. Some of my remote coworkers are in town this week, so we’ve been having lots of meetings to discuss things in person while we can as I’m apparently the only person who can function just as well in an online meeting as in an in-person meeting. It was scheduled right up to the time of the eclipse and I pointed out, several hours earlier, that maybe we should consider moving it or shortening the meeting so we wouldn’t miss the celestial event of the decade, but I was assure that it wouldn’t be a problem and that we’d definitely wrap up the meeting ahead of time. In the end, the only reason we did is because I pulled the ripcord on the meeting and made it clear that I, at least, was going to leave even if no one else did. It was genuinely shocking to learn just how many people weren’t interested in going to take a look at the eclipse. Sure, there were a lot of people outside for the event, but I think we never got past half the company’s local population. I mean, sure, most eclipses look like any other eclipse you’ve seen, but every single one of them is pretty dang impressive!

I mean, just think about the absolutely random quirk of the universe that made our moon the right size, the right distance from Earth, and on the right kind of orbital path to, every so often, pass in front of the sun. It’s so easy for that to not happen! Hell, we might even still have humans around on the planet when the moon finally get too far away to cause the same visual phenomenon (in a few hundred million years or whatever). There’s a limited window for this sort of thing to be happening (in the grand scale of the cosmos, anyway) and we get to be present for the time it’s happen! How cool is that? It’s incredibly cool! Even if there are extraterrestrial sapient beings out there, it is incredibly unlikely that any of them live in a place that has solar eclipses like our own, where the moon is just big enough to block out most of the sun, leaving just a tiny ring of light for us to see as we find ways to look at it without going blind.

People have been observing solar eclipses for centuries. Since the movement of the celestial bodies are trackable and predictable, people have been scheduling major events around then since they first learned to look up and invented strong enough sunglasses to see what is going on. Or used the pinhole trick to create an image on the ground of the shadow cast by the moon. One of the most common bits of idle speculation I’ve heard over the past couple weeks is how people must have absolutely freaked out about eclipses when they first started happening, but they’ve been happening since before people evolved, so I bet there were tons of stories about how, sometimes, the moon would catch the sun and blot out the sky. Sure, it probably took some doing for someone to find a way to look at the event and not go blind, but you can see things starting to line up well before they get too close together to look at and I’m sure plenty of people went blind staring at eclipses in the past, all of whom would still be able to describe what they saw still since it’s not like staring directly into the sun will kill you immediately. That tends to be more of a knock-on effect of ruining your vision via overexposure to UV rays.

It will be another twenty years before we get to see another total solar eclipse in the contiguous US. Who knows what might happen between now and then, though. Maybe we’ll combat climate change by creating intense cloud cover to cool our planet or maybe we’ll crash the climate entirely and send us into some awful ice age. Maybe a super volcano will erupt and the sun will be blotted out by endless ash. Or maybe we’ll all be more or less the same, just twenty years older. Anything is possible. I just hope I’m around to see it. I’ve never had the chance to see a total solar eclipse and I’d really like to see one at some point. Sure, there will be more opportunities outside the US over the next decade, but traveling abroad for an eclipse is even more daunting that traveling within the US for an eclipse. It will be very expensive if I try to avoid waiting twenty years, but who knows? Maybe I’ll be able to afford it. Until then, though, I’m glad I got a chance to catch this rare event and will never understand why people would rather work for another thirty minutes than see the sun be blotted out by the moon. It just doesn’t make sense to me.