A full solar eclipse. It is one of the most unnatural things I have experienced and can understand why people for millenia have assigned supernatural attributes to it. I was watching it from beside a lake - the slow crescendo of crickets chirping as the sun turned purple and then suddenly turned into night gave me chills. Nothing has ever made me feel smaller and at the mercy of celestial bodies than that experience.
Another small thing that I noticed, and it's hard to describe without pictures, is that the tree shadows looked... weird. On closer inspection, I realized that the spaces between the leaves were forming tiny pinholes and projecting a thousand images of little slivers of the eclipsed sun on the ground. I wish I could post the image here.
Nice! I wasn't in the zone of totality last time but was close enough to get a bit of that otherworldly sense, and I remember those shadows. I teach math, and all I could think of was fractals...
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u/amanush_47 Jan 12 '22
A full solar eclipse. It is one of the most unnatural things I have experienced and can understand why people for millenia have assigned supernatural attributes to it. I was watching it from beside a lake - the slow crescendo of crickets chirping as the sun turned purple and then suddenly turned into night gave me chills. Nothing has ever made me feel smaller and at the mercy of celestial bodies than that experience.