One of the funniest comedians on the circuit is Brian Regan. If you cannot catch his act live, google him on the net. In one of my favorite bits of his, he tells the story of remembering when in the eighth grade he went to his school’s science fair. One classmate, at the last minute, gathered round objects such as tennis balls, balloons and softballs. He then arranged nine of them using wire coat hangers around a yellow soccer ball in the center. When his teacher asked what he brought, the kid responded, “It’s the solar system. The big yellow one is the sun.”

Yes, indeed that big yellow one is the sun that we usually take for granted. But sometimes that big yellow one takes center stage as it will on the eighth of April this year.

If you are situated on a certain part of the planet, you will be able to witness the path of a full solar eclipse. Luckily, Sullivan County is on that path!

A total solar eclipse happens when the new moon perfectly aligns with the sun creating a shadow on the planet earth. For a brief period of time the sun is entirely blocked by the moon and all you can see is the sun’s outer atmosphere known as the corona. This eclipse will sweep across North America touching three countries, Mexico, United States and Canada. It will race across the landscape turning day into night. If you are in a certain area, you luckily will observe it for several minutes.

No matter how many times you have seen one in your life it is still a special moment. You get to experience something extraordinary that early civilizations worshipped and even built monuments to let them know when it was occurring.

Solar eclipses like we are going to experience on April 8th unleash strange phenomenon to those on the planet. For example, if it occurs during a sweltering summer day, temperatures can drop between 10 and 20 degrees. Even though this is happening in April, you may still feel the chill when the moon blocks the sun.

It may also affect the ionosphere, which is the layer of charged particles that surrounds the earth. In some cases, that causes cosmic static that scrambles radio waves. 

 Ancient civilizations, without the use of modern science, had other beliefs about the eclipse. In ancient China, many thought that solar eclipses represented a dragon devouring the sun. To fend off the dragon, they would make loud noises and attempt to scare it away.

Some civilizations were terrified by solar eclipses. The Greeks interpreted them as signs of anger and impending disaster.

Ancient cultures without scientific understanding and instruments somehow found a way to build structures to predict the eclipse patterns. One of the most famous ones is Stonehenge in England. The entire monument, consisting of rings of large vertical stones is aligned to predict the summer and winter solstices. The inner horseshoe of the nineteen stones at Stonehenge acts like a long-term calculator capable of predicting eclipses. To this day no one can figure out how they were able to build it in such a way. It is believed it was constructed somewhere around 3100 BC to 1500 BC. FYI, BC does not mean before calculators.

Humans are not the only living organisms on the planet that are affected by an eclipse. Scientists have noticed behavior in animals unlike anything that happens in their normal life. For example, giraffes in zoos often gallop quickly going back to their enclosure. Flamingos tend to gather in circles around their babies to protect them. In the Galapagos islands, the solar eclipse seems to be an aphrodisiac for tortoises, who start mating during that small period of darkness. For those creatures, as the song made famous by Dean Martin goes, “when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.”

Hudson Cooper is a resident of Sullivan County, a writer, comedian and actor.