Thursday, August 24, 2017

Totall(it)y Awesome


by Dan Masterton

Did you guys hear there was an eclipse this week!?

I say that in jest, but in all seriousness, I love astronomy. The skies have long intrigued me, and as a college freshman, I quite excitedly chose astronomy and cosmology1 to satisfy my college requirement of two science courses.2 I was pumped for the eclipse, even if I felt sort of hipster-y, since I and my fellow nerds were into this scene way before it was cool.

I decided to go the viewing party at the park in town, where I figured there’d be a little crowd of gawkers, as the library was offering crafts, DIY stations to create safe viewing techniques, and even live music by a local group. When I got there around 11am, my stroller-wheeling self was overwhelmed by activity.

There was a huge crowd3 -- people of all ages, tons of kids, families, young adults, and elderly residents alike. People were quite confidently wearing their goofy eclipse-viewing glasses, as if they’d just walked out of an early 90s 3-D movie; people were wielding quite the array of outlandish apparatuses, including one dad who had a cardboard tube suitable for rolling a carpet connected to some sort of tripod and box; and when I figured it’d be more low-key to make a pinhole projector than to fashion a box to wear on my head, people were wearing boxes on their heads. That whole scene added to the frustration of the persistent cloud cover that brought out my snarky side.
Back to my hipster-y feel from before, rolling onto this scene felt like I was walking past one of those on-trend bars or restaurants. You know the ones... It looks cool. There’s an attractive, intangible vibe coming off it. It’s crowded and only getting more crowded-er. People are talking about it and making plans to come. But few people, if anyone, can clearly articulate what exactly is cool about it.

The eclipse just had that X-factor that can’t be easily pinned down. The way this non-technological, non-media event rallied people shows that we need to more openly embrace natural opportunities to be laid bare, to have something of magnitude leave us raw and vulnerable, to make space to simply appreciate existence, because these things compel us as humans. (see below) GHW Bush; WGN/Skilling; that guy) Like I’ve mentioned in the past, we just aren’t willing to let go of our personal autonomy over what we’re willing to pay attention to, and we sustain an unreasonably high bar, or at least a stubbornly subjective and individualized bar, for when we’ll allow ourselves to care about something.

Ultimately, it’s wildly frustrating to figure out what will motivate, captivate, and allure people. In other words, what will go viral and won’t and why?! Humans and our attention spans are so fickle, especially as our proliferating connectivity gives us so many options that are always accessible without interruption.4 Yet, here on August 21, 2017, something about a solar eclipse captured the imagination of a huge amount of people.

On the surface, it caters comfortably to our social media obsession. It’s easily photographable. We shoot our amateur videos to post and send; we can take pictures of the places we view it from; we can take selfies in our goofy glasses or with our rickety viewing kits. And that’s actually cool on some level because it hypes something natural and scientific and organic.

But that was all fairly predictable. Zooming out further, a solar eclipse is simply something huge, something big, something grand. It’s the deep-view perspective from our huge planet looking toward our massive home star as our giant rocky moon comes between us for a good show. A solar eclipse is visual and palpable. We can see the shadow, we can fall into shade and unusual midday darkness and feel the short-lived cool of the temperature drop.

Most of all, a solar eclipse is rare. It gives us that scarce and uncommon thing we crave; we gain the ability to own or experience something in a moment that not everyone gets to have, and we delight in that privileged moment.

The oomph of the eclipse comes in appreciating that rare moment not so much as something collected and possessed but as something to behold and marinade in. To me, science is the language of Creation, the way we discern God’s elegant hand animating our world. We can see it in the complexity and efficiency of the body, in the breathtaking landscapes of the earth, and across the universe -- from the destruction in supernovae and black holes, the enigmatic origins in the big bang and inflation, the discovery of exoplanets and solar systems, and our quest to discover the “Goldilocks planet” that is just right for human-like life.

In learning the ins and outs of astronomy, my jaw metaphorically hit the floor in learning about eclipses. The moon orbits the earth. The earth orbits the sun. Orbits are elliptical, so they’re not precise circles. The planets have perihelions and aphelions, the moon has a perigee and apogee. Basically, there’s a lot of complicated movement, shape, and size as everything hurtles yet somehow retains surprising elegance and order.

Lunar eclipses are definitely neat, but the earth is way bigger than the sun and easily blocks the sun’s light as it eclipses the moon periodically. On the other hand, solar eclipses are wild. The moon is tiny, astronomically speaking. The sun is MUCH larger. Yet, as these orbits spin on, moments of total eclipse happen because of an amazing ratio: the ratio of the size of the sun to its distance to the earth is almost exactly equal to the ratio of the size of the moon to its distance to the earth. And because of this, we can experience “totality,” a short window for certain locations on earth where the moon covers the sun almost exactly. Not because it’s larger than the sun and not in a partial way because it’s smaller than the sun, but because it’s an almost perfect, exact match.

SO COOL
I’m not one to argue proofs of God, though there’s great merit in such lines of thinking, especially for those who think well in that way. Instead, I draw a powerful correlation between such elegant beauty and the benevolent, loving Creation of our Creator God. It’s especially beautiful because eclipses are not part of our sustenance. The sun’s size and distance is just right for our earthly existence, but a solar eclipse doesn’t hugely affect us. It’s not so long that it adversely affects our life here; it’s not so short that it can’t be experienced and enjoyed for its beauty. It’s just right to be savored without fear.

And it’s in this gentle and moderate, yet immense and cosmically grand, beauty that I see God, and hope you can, too. Beyond the wild spectacle of huge crowds with funny glasses and boxes on their heads, this cosmic moment reflects the suffusive love of our Creator God, the love that made us in His image and became Incarnate for our liberation, of our Creator. And that’s the larger miracle.


1 Note: astronomy not astrology, the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial bodies interpreted as having an influence on human affairs and the natural world; cosmology, not cosmetology, the professional skill or practice of beautifying the face, hair, and skin.↩


2 Big tip of the cap to Prof. Peter Garnavich, who was way overqualified to be teaching a 100-level class to a bunch of Arts & Letters and Business bimbos. My four friends and I greatly appreciated it and sustain a clandestine cult-like following of him to this day.↩


3 Estimates had it at around 4,000 people. This after, a few weeks ago, the three of us watched Field of Dreams for summer movie nights in the same park with about 75 other people.↩


4 When was the last time you went a day without using anything connected to the internet? For me, I think it was my last trip in Europe in Spring 2014. Yikes. ↩

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