Sun, Moon, Earth Quotes

“For human beings, with our limited lives and limited means of travel, these vagaries of celestial alignment mean the majority of people on Earth have never seen a total solar eclipse.”
― Tyler Nordgren, Sun, Moon, Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses, from Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets

“Every clear night is an opportunity to experience something amazing. I have seen comets stretch across the sky, viewed sunlight glinting off the dust that floats between the planets, and witnessed a Milky Way so bright that the glow of its billion stars cast a shadow at my feet. But in all my life I have never seen anything as awe inspiring, as awesome—in the original definition of the word—as a total eclipse of the Sun.”
― Tyler Nordgren, Sun, Moon, Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses, from Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets

“The seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. Ibn al-Haytham, known in the West as Alhazen,”
― Tyler Nordgren, Sun, Moon, Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses, from Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets

“Go to any planetarium, and you can see the universe circle around you on the surface of a giant celestial sphere, just as it appears in reality. It works, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is wrong (although a 2014 survey by the National Science Foundation revealed that one in four Americans was not aware of that).”
― Tyler Nordgren, Sun, Moon, Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses, from Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets

“The Greek origin of the word “eclipse” is ekleipsis, meaning omission or abandonment. Ancient Chinese eclipse accounts contain the characters for “ugly” and “abnormal.” For the Aztec, the eclipsed Sun “faltered” and became “restless” and”
― Tyler Nordgren, Sun, Moon, Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses, from Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets

“Suddenly, the Sun’s thin sickle of light breaks apart into an array of brilliant specks that dance and shimmer along the Moon’s jet-black rim. They are called Baily’s beads—the last rays of the vanishing Sun streaming through actual mountain valleys along the curved lunar surface.”
― Tyler Nordgren, Sun, Moon, Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses, from Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets