Sky events fascinate me. Every night (and every day!) I can go outside, and unless it’s totally cloudy, I can find something interesting to see. Eclipses are an example of something that I find quite fascinating. The mechanics are simple enough – one object moves between another object and the Sun. In the case of a total solar eclipse, the Moon moves between Earth and the Sun, and casts a shadow on our planet. If I’m in the shadow, this is what I see.
That may sound pretty simple, almost mechanical. And it is. But the part about standing on the planet and watching as the shadow sweeps toward you, and then being engulfed in that shadow for a few minutes (at most), brings on a feeling of awe at the majesty of the whole thing. It’s pretty darned cool!
And it’s no small wonder that we (humans) name things in our every day lives after sky phenomena that amaze us. Think about quasars for example. They’re bright, distant points of light that turn out to be distant galaxies with active (very active) nuclei. Astronomers think they have black holes at their centers which are powering huge releases of energy that cause them to be very bright at x-ray and sometimes optical wavelengths of light. But, in the 1960s, when the term “quasar” was coined from the longer description of “quasi-stellar objects,” it was a cool-sounding word that sounded “spacey” and “modern” and so a TV was named after this distant, bright, mysterious class of objects.
Or, think about cars. The first space-related car name I can remember is the Ford Galaxy. And, of course, the Subaru, which is the Japanese name for the Pleiades, that great little grouping of stars in the constellation Taurus. Or, the Ford Taurus!
Getting back to eclipses, there’s a sporty little car named the Eclipse. I suppose the name was space-related, as well as motivated by the carmaker’s desire to get across the idea that this car eclipses all others, leaves every other car in the dust. Or maybe they just liked the name.
I bought one ten years ago, not simply because of the name. But it was black, like a total solar eclipse. It was a great car in every way, and I was sorry to see it go when I finally drove it onto a dealer’s lot last week and traded it in for a new one, in the penumbral shade of titanium pearl. I guess it seems to fit my space-oriented interests!
Look around you and see how many space-themed objects exist in modern life. Kinda tells you something about our interest in the sky, even if we (as a human race) don’t always think about it in those terms.
