The Sun & the Eclipse
In this eclipse, you cannot talk about this stellar event, without acknowledging one of the star players in this show, our closest star in the universe, the sun.
When we’re talking about our little corner of the universe, size and distance can numb and overwhelm our human brains with the enormity of space.
The sun is a mind-numbing 93-million miles from the earth. 93 million! That distance varies a bit throughout the year because our orbit isn’t a perfect circle. We call this distance a light year.
The sun is so far away, it takes sunlight about 8 minutes to reach us. With the August eclipse, it’s difficult to imagine how far apart the sun and the moon actually are from where we see them on the surface of the earth.
Our moon is about 238,900 miles away from the earth, compared to the 93 million miles in distance to the sun, the moon is seen as a hop, skip and an Apollo mission away, which in space is considered fairly close.
But back to the sun, to put it mildly, it’s huge! The sun is so big it could fit about 1.3 million earths inside.
But, of course, without the sun we’d have nothing, the sun provides us with energy, essentially life as we know it. And with the august eclipse, it’s a reminder of how special this cosmic event is to witness, especially when you can watch it from your own backyards.
