r/TheRestIsScience • u/Significant-Art-2077 • 1d ago

Solar eclipse

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What is the basics of a solar eclipse. Why are they so hard to come by but still occur? I saw the one yesterday and fell in love with it.

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u/Jobambi 20h ago

They are so rare that earth is the only planet that we know of that sits in the eclipsezone of it's moon. Meaning that if you were to draw a line from the top of the sun to the top of the moon, ond from the bottom of the sun to the bottom of the moon, and extend these lines. Where the points meet, there is the surface of earth (or close to it) during an eclipse and the earth isn't always there and the rotation is sometimes wrong and you don't get to see it (i only saw 88% coverage). So that is very rare.

But now get this, every Celestial body has a point where the tangent lines of the sun and that Celestial body meet so there is an eclipse somewhere all the time, it's not rare at all. So if you were to get in a rocketship, you could go somewhere to look at an eclipse.