Oh, So Blue...

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I was listening earlier this week to one of the excellent, re-run, Melvyn Bragg "In Our Time" Radio Four programmes. It's principal topic was eclipses, solar and lunar. It was a fascinating discussion overall, but an anecdote related by one of the guest experts chimed with me personally. He had, as a child in junior school been led out into the playground along with his classmates, to observe a partial eclipse of the sun. His teacher had prepared a telescope and a screen of sorts to safely show the image of the occlusion of the sun as it happened in real time, and tasked the class with making observations of time, temperature and so-on during the event. I say this chimed with me because I had exactly the same experience back in my childhood at City Road School in Birmingham, with our teacher setting us similar tasks to record the event. I don't recall the exact year, but I guess it was early-mid 1960s. I've never witnessed a total eclipse of the sun - and may never - but I've seen a number of partials, and they are phenomenal enough in their strangeness; demonstrating just how dependent we as a species are on that local star of ours for survival, and just how accidental we are, born of a baby bear's porridge combination of physics and chemistry: just the right place, just the right time. Next up: Musk's Mars Colony folly...

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