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Hello, everyone! Consider this a proof of life.

This newsletter ain’t dead yet.

I know we’ve all moved on to solar flares and auroras, but about a month ago I drove from California to Texas — over 3,000 miles roundtrip — to catch the total solar eclipse, when the moon passes directly in front of the sun. I know it sounds a little insane to say I drove that far just to see the moon pass directly in front of the sun, but it’s so much more than that. If you’ve only ever seen a partial eclipse, looking through special glasses the entire time, then you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The sun is obviously a lot bigger than the moon, the earth, and all the other planets in our solar system combined, but there’s a peculiar, random quirk that seems almost too good to be true: the sun is 400 times the size of the moon, but the moon is about 400 times closer, making the sun and the moon the same relative size from our perspective. So when the moon passes in front of the sun just perfectly, it blocks everything out save for the sun’s outer corona, creating a black hole in the sky surrounded by a ghostly glow.

Usually the Earth casts a shadow on the moon, but during a total solar eclipse, it’s the moon’s turn to cast its shadow upon us. If you’re at a higher elevation, you can actually watch this shadow race across the land straight towards you. The air gets noticeably colder. The light becomes completely alien, as if it were alive for the first time and uncomfortable in its own skin. As the darkness rushes over you, you’re surrounded by a 360 degree sunset. And that’s when you can remove your eclipse glasses and stare directly at the sun for a couple minutes of divine euphoria.

Even though it’s a relatively frequent phenomenon around the world, it’s still infrequent enough in any one geographic location and incomprehensibly strange enough that it had quite a few people nervous this time around. Apocalypticism permeated the Internet leading up to this eclipse, but on my trip only one person seemed unsettled by the whole thing: The woman who checked us into one of our hotels was saying how her husband was convinced this eclipse would somehow lead to the collapse of the entire worldwide banking system. And that “They” (whoever “They” are) would use it as cover for some nefarious deeds. I reassured her that I saw a total eclipse in Idaho in 2017 and (as far as I know) Idaho still stands to this day. (Will someone please check on Idaho? I’d hate to be wrong.)

In fact the 2017 eclipse was such a magical experience, I knew I had to share it with some of my loved ones this time around, especially since it won’t happen again in the U.S. for another 20 years. So a few of us met up outside of Dallas, Texas. The stress over the ambiguous cloud cover, then hearing the gasps of people around me when it cleared up just in time, and meeting such kind, interesting strangers along the way (including the concerned hotelier) was all worth it.

Even though this was my second total solar eclipse, it still overwhelmed my senses with how strange it all felt. Looking up at that enormous black hole in the sky, a deep black ringed with an ethereal glow, was exquisite — a tangible absence, the kind of negative space I’ve written about before. It reminded me of how microscopic I am within time and space, yet also part of a greater whole, an epic contradiction both horrifying and reassuring at the same time.

Just a slight variation on the moon’s size or distance and none of this would even happen. And it won’t last forever! In about 600 million years, the moon will have drifted far enough away from the Earth (about 1 ½ inches per year) that this phenomenon will cease to exist. It’s not a cosmic guarantee; most planets will never experience this. We’re just lucky.

Eclipses are great markers of time:

• A total solar eclipse recorded by Mayans would have occurred on July 16 in the year 790, which allows researchers to correlate ancient Mayan calendars to our own.

• Starting with his first year of teaching in 1978 and for the next 16 years, a high school science teacher promised his students they could all meet up decades later in 2024 to watch the eclipse together. Sure enough, as you can see in this 3-minute NBC News video, more than 100 of his former students showed up.

They’re also highly cinematic. Christian Blauvelt for IndieWire wrote about the ABC News broadcast of this year’s eclipse, calling it “one of 2024’s great cinematic moments:”

Only the latest generation HD cameras could have rendered both the anchors in the foreground and the corona in the background with such clarity — we were really seeing something on TV that’s never been seen before. Nature provided the drama, but ABC News was there to capture it with the most precise level of timing and staging and framing.

[David] Muir brought unusually descriptive language to make viewers feel like they were there, waxing poetic about the “mountains and the hills surrounding the lake backlit right now by the most beautiful sunset you could imagine,” the birds “racing across the nighttime sky,” “the backlight hitting all the sailboats sitting here quietly… the water is barely moving, it’s like ice.” When do you ever get a moment like this with TV news?

But that’s not the only time eclipses have played a role in cinema history.

Nevil Maskelyne (1863 – 1924), famed magician and amateur astronomer, not to be confused with Nevil Maskelyne (1732 – 1811), professional astronomer and you never know maybe an amateur magician (and quite possibly no relation), wanted something extraordinary to show off at his famed Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London. His father, stage magician John Nevil Maskelyne, helped found the Magic Circle, putting on magic shows and supernatural investigations at the Egyptian Hall that influenced famed fellow magician and filmmaker Georges Méliès, whom I wrote about a couple years ago for the film “Hugo.” Papa John Nevil also more consequentially invented the public pay toilet (a scourge to this day), so clearly Little Nevil needed to wow the pants off everyone. What better way than to bring them a total solar eclipse?

He first journeyed to India in 1898 for the British Astronomical Association, but the film was stolen on his way back to England. So two years later on May 28, 1900, he arrived in North Carolina to stand in the path of totality.

According to the British Film Institute:

It was not an easy feat to film. Maskelyne had to make a special telescopic adapter for his camera to capture the event. This is the only film by Maskelyne that we know to have survived.

The original film fragment held in The Royal Astronomical Society’s archive has been painstakingly scanned and restored in 4K by conservation experts at the BFI National Archive, who have reassembled and retimed the film frame by frame. The film is part of BFI Player’s recently released Victorian Film collection, viewers are now able to experience this first film of a solar eclipse since the event was originally captured over a century ago.

They explain that the resulting video is “the first surviving astronomical film in the world. It is a fragment showing the corona around totality and the ‘diamond ring’ effect.”

You can watch it here. It’s only a minute long, but it’s an astonishing contribution to the early developments of cinema.

The Maskelyne family overall was pretty fascinating:

• Nevil could also be considered one of the first hackers, when he proved that “the inventor of radio” Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless telegraphy wasn’t as secure as he’d claimed.

• Nevil’s son, Jasper Maskelyne, also went on to become a stage magician and was, according to Wikipedia, “remembered for his accounts of using his magical abilities to deceive the Nazis.” OK sure, why not?

Until next time! 👋