View from Sandusky Bay, Ohio, North America, Planet Earth
The tulips glowed in their bed
With friendly bulbs of yellow and red.
The children played a game of tag
Until my 4-year-old began to nag:
“I’m too hot, Mom, there’s too much sun,
I want to go inside, this isn’t too fun.”
“Why don’t you look in the telescope,” I said
While checking for fever with my palm on his forehead,
“you’ll see that the sun is looking very funny.”
He looked skyward and said “It just looks sunny”
I saw my chance and made a quick motion
To rub his face with suntan lotion.
He squirmed away from me and the glass
And ran off to play in the grass.
My eight-year-old looked into the eyepiece.
She shouted, “It’s beginning to decrease!”
My son ran back from his toys in the clover
and promptly knocked the telescope over.
When we set up the scope again
The yellow disk looked quite plain
Like a picture my daughter tried
But with a bite taken from its side,
Looking nothing like real astronomy
Like when we visited an observatory.
That time I did not believe it when they said we’d see NGC 5194 the Whirlpool Galaxy
But when I bent my head to look, the dark field held it,
An illustration someone must have placed inside the telescope,
impossibly small, impossibly dim, impossibly clear,
drained of all color, the unmistakable whirlpool and its double spiral,
one multi-kiloparsec stream of light and dark
unwinding all the way to the galaxy’s companion smudge.
I wondered if anyone was sitting on a world in the long galactic arm of NGC 5194
Unaware of tidal forces from the billion stars of NGC 5195
Which plunges through the Whirlpool every half a billion years or so
And rearranges their night sky.
My boy said he was tired and went inside.
My daughter adjusted the scope and stayed wide-eyed,
Taking turns viewing the show with the neighbors’ kid
While with each turn more of the sun was hid
Until I noticed I was no longer hot.
A glance upward to check for any change; there was not.
The tulip bulbs glowed more but the bed was growing dim
I told my girl to find her brother and then come out with him
A slight breeze licked my cheek and raised goosebumps on each limb
A sunward glance showed no change still and made my vision swim,
Though in my eclipse glasses it had shrunk to a yellow rim.
I put the specs on my kids and said “it’s about to begin”
The sun still burned
I put my glasses back
A last crescent shined
Then all I saw was black.
Insolation on Earth’s surface is absent within a disk approximately 92 kilometers in radius,
Traveling 400 meters per second for a point duration of 229 seconds,
Based on Earth rotation rate and lunar orbital parameters.
Cloud cover is minimal over Sandusky Bay so that Jupiter and Venus
are visible along the ecliptic in a sky that is black except at the horizon
which glows with refracted light in a three hundred sixty degree arc.
The daytime sun no longer appears. Instead
Observers see a disk blacker than the black sky,
Rimmed by a wire-thin ring of sharp white light,
Punctuated by the orange dot of a solar prominence
whose looping morphology can not be resolved by the naked eye.
Extending several solar radii from the ring is a faint white region,
impossibly large, impossibly dim, impossibly clear,
its visible edge jagged yet soft on dull space.
The blackened star and fountains of plasma remind observers of the end of the world,
Though they are only seeing what is always behind the blue sky.
I wanted to stare till the black sun was gone
But I looked down and told the kids to put their glasses back on,
I sneaked a peek as our sun came into view
Returning color to flowers and grass and our bungalow too.
“Hey kids, do you want a snack?
Don’t forget, we were gonna call Grandma back.”
Photo of Whirlpool Galaxy.
