Thread

1. ionwake · 1790545810 · focus · HN ↗

   is this a bad moment to mention how weird it is that the moon is perfectly positioned to create eclipses?

   I think its pretty incomprehensible odds if you ask google.

   But I could be wrong I know literally nothing about astronomy, it just always surprised me its not common, but it be cool if someone could explain that

   1. steanne · 1790546055 · focus · HN ↗

      it was my vague understanding that what is weird is the apparent size matching. since the moon is slowly moving away, eventually we'll no longer have total solar eclipses, just annular and partial.

      1. teamonkey · 1790548103 · focus · HN ↗

         The relative sizes are approximate, not perfect, but close enough that our monkey brains interpret it as more than a coincidence.

         1. JumpCrisscross · 1790548627 · focus · HN ↗

            Idk, one could come up with a hypothesis that eclipses provide the first tangible validation of a system of mathematics.

            1. teamonkey · 1790550022 · focus · HN ↗

               If there were greater significance to it, I’d have thought the the visual sizes of the Sun and Moon would have been perfectly matched, rather than to within a few percent, give-or-take.

               Also since the Sun-Earth distance varies and so does the Earth-Moon distance, the coverage of the Sun varies. We sometimes get annular eclipses where the Sun is not totally covered.

               1. lloeki · 1790581624 · focus · HN ↗

                  <distant growling low resonating voice that makes galaxies shake> Damn, those pesky IEEE-754 accumulation errors again.

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