By Anthony O. Miller
THE DAY began with a bang, or at least a rattle, as two earthquakes and several aftershocks shook most of Cyprus awake. The tremors augured well for the day of the last solar eclipse of the millennium.
But if yesterday’s partial solar eclipse filled any Cyprus hearts with wonder, it was more the wonder at all the pre-eclipse hype, than anything that happened in the heavens.
For weeks, now, the air had been thick with anticipation of the great event, and official warnings against staring at the eclipse without special glasses, lest blindness result.
Yesterday’s event was slated to begin at 1.07pm, last until 3.59pm, and blanket the island in its maximum darkness for 2.5 minutes, beginning at 2.35pm.
Right on time, the moon began passing across the face of the sun, casting a shadow along a curved swath of earth that started somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and would end somewhere in the Bay of Bengal.
Places like the southwest of Britain as well as parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and India were pegged to get the full effect both in the sky and on the ground.
Above Cyprus, the eclipse was to be 86 per cent total, meaning that at its peak, 14 per cent of the sun would not be blocked out by the moon.
But that was a fighting 14 per cent. For none of the day-turned-to-night blackness that many had expected was seen in Cyprus during yesterday’s solar-lunar conjunction.
None of several birds in an outdoor cage showed any signs of stress, aberrant behaviour or awareness that anything different from the ordinary was happening in the skies above. They just hopped and fluttered as usual.
No shadows blurred to indistinction under the moon’s shadow as the event reached its peak. No animals ran wildly in the streets, or howled, meowed or roared in frenzy as the sun “disappeared” behind the moon.
Truth be told, were it not for a bit of assiduous watch-watching, those in Cyprus who lacked the special sun-watching glasses to track the eclipse, might not have known anything special was happening above them in the sky.
The 14 per cent of the sun not covered by the moon cast just about the same amount of light onto the island as the sun normally does on a hazy, humid Cyprus afternoon — just the kind of day the Meteorological Service said yesterday would be.
“Of course,” said Ioannis Fakas, President of the Cyprus Astronomical Society. The kind of darkness many expected to bathe the island during the eclipse happens “only in a total eclipse.”
“This 14 per cent of the sun’s light,” that still shone down on Cyprus “is much more (light) than at dusk. You can read a newspaper in it, because this 14 per cent of the sun’s light is too much brightness to darken the skies.”
“At 2.30,” he said, “it was too light to be as dark as the night, but too dark to have been a normal day.” It was impossible to argue with that.
As to animals driven wild by the event, Fakas admitted there may not have been any of this to report, “but at 2.30 (near the peak of the eclipse), I went up to the roof and several persons there noticed there were no birds flying around.”
