Adam's Cool Website

Pondering the Orb

Or, how I spent my imperfect solar eclipse.

While Denver enjoyed clear skies, we topped out at about 68% coverage for the 2024 solar eclipse.

“Days and months are travellers of eternity,” writes Matsuo Basho in his poetic travelogue Narrow Road to the Interior. “So are the years that pass by.” Celestial events, then, are a kind of crossroads in the calendar’s journey, a shared moment that stops and orients us all. They’re reminders that endless procession of days isn’t arbitrary, that we’re all clinging to the same sphere as it whirls around the same star. And no sight in the sky is as dramatic as an eclipse.

I spent April’s solar eclipse at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where a crowd of families and schoolkids on field trips had gathered along with a few lone, space-curious adults like me. Visitors stood around and watched NASA’s live broadcast from the path of totality on two large projection screens, while kids and parents lined up for the chance to peer at the sun through a handful of solar telescopes set up outside.

I walked through an empty taxidermy gallery and took an elevator up to the museum’s terrace, a concrete-and-glass balcony with a commanding view over City Park and the Denver skyline. No crowds here: a small, if growing handful of people chatted and wrangled kids, occasionally glancing up through eclipse glasses at the growing bite the moon had taken out of the sun.

I got out my laptop and tried to work, but I couldn't focus–how dead inside do you need to be to read budget spreadsheets under an eclipse? Eventually, I gave up, closed my computer, and laid on my back to stare at the sun.

Navajo traditionally believe that the eclipse is the death and rebirth of the sun and give it privacy by avoiding looking at it. To Hindus, the eclipse is the head of the demon Rahu swallowing the sun. Muslims see an eclipse as proof of Allah’s glory. Jews believed–some still believe–that a solar eclipse is an ill omen for the world, and a lunar one a bad sign for us in particular. Modern Western astrologers are divided between viewing the solar eclipse as a time for growth and one for caution.

For my part, I'm happy for an eclipse to be something that just happens, and myself to be someone who just happens to exist while it does. I'm finding more and more pleasure in my own simple existence, a thing that feels improbable when I consider all these unfathomably large balls of rock and helium spinning around in space, and that only gets more statistically improbable as I age. I think there are worse reasons for people to gather than to all exist together at crossroads like that and, for a moment, watch the days, months, and years journey by.

Once the eclipse had peaked, I found my way down the elevator and out the back door, past the still long line at the telescopes and into the park. I laid down in the grass with my laptop bag as a pillow. Then I put my glasses back on and watched the eclipse wane, like a person waving at a ship as it inches over the horizon or standing in a driveway as a car turns off the street where they live and out of sight.