The weirdest things that happen during an eclipse

🌚 Unicode doesn’t have an emoji for “total solar eclipse,” but this is the closest one we could find.
Today: Eclipse poetry, Winston Churchill’s private nurse, and fairies. Written by

Harris Sockel

.

Today at 3:18 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time in Niagara Falls, NY — the closest totality location to me — the moon will fully block the sun.

For almost four minutes, things will go eerily dark. If you have eclipse glasses, you may catch the “diamond ring,” a dotted circle of shimmering sunlight around the lunar rim. It happens when the sun shines through minuscule crags on the moon.

Here’s science writer

Rebecca Jean T.

listing the weirdest stuff that happens in an eclipse. A few:

• Your shadow gets a little curly, wavy, and shaky as the sun goes crescent-shaped.
• You may notice a subtle change in colors before the sun is fully obscured. Reds and oranges will fade first.
• You may feel an “eclipse wind,” or a slight breeze.

For another perspective, here’s a poem that’ll take you back to the July 11, 1991 total solar eclipse, which crossed Hawaii, Mexico, and Central America. It was a particularly long one — almost seven minutes, whereas most eclipses last just 1–4.5 minutes.

Debra G. Harman, MEd.

writes:

We stop for totality
to stand in sand and heat.
The desert closes shop.
The wind rises and night falls.
Air cools and the sky wraps us
in seven minutes, silent but soft.
Murmurs of strangers
In eclipse shades, sharing Corona beer
and penumbra, waiting for the diamond ring.

What else we’re reading

• Dan Stevens
  ’ grandmother was Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s private nurse when he had pneumonia during the height of World War II. Her letters, republished here, offer a fascinating look at history through a personal lens (she used to stay up late at Churchill’s desk laughing and knitting with her fellow nurse). “Like so many of her generation,” Stevens writes, “[war] shaped the rest of her life, creating a stoicism and realism that also masked emotion.”
• Life gets a little weirder (and better) when you believe in fairies. If you’ve ever wandered around San Francisco, maybe you’ve seen these fairy doors? I saw them all the time when I was living there, and I was perplexed until I read this story.
  Alexander Verbeek
  makes the case for everyday whimsy (like fairy dwellings in public parks): “If you always live in the rational world, with its hard facts and undisputable truth, consider bringing in some balance from the other side of the spectrum where beauty, fantasy, creativity, and hope live.”

Your daily dose of practical wisdom (about software development)

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Camille Fournier

, author of The Manager’s Path, delivers an incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding. Skill #21: “How to run a meeting, and no, being the person who talks the most in the meeting is not the same thing as running it.”

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