Thursday, April 11, 2024
Good morning.
In the four years I’ve been preparing this report, the observation of terrestrial events has been my stock in trade. But I’m taking a break from my usual practice today, to fix my gaze skyward, toward heaven and the celestial.
I’d like to share and showcase some amazing photos of this week’s biggest news event, the solar eclipse. These images have not been published elsewhere, so it’s a scoop (of sorts).
On Monday morning, my wife Louise and I accompanied our son Brendan on a 300-mile trek to Ohio and back, chasing the eclipse.
Brendan’s a medicinal chemist by vocation and a science geek by avocation. He’d flown in from Los Angeles to get a better view of the event that captivated much of North America.
While he was our navigator, I drove and Louise rode in the back seat of our Ford sedan. It seemed like a scene from the movie Storm Chasers (with the exception that there was no danger chasing this stunning cosmic display, as long as your eyes are protected as ours were).
We began the day thinking we were driving north to Erie. But according to the satellite images of the cloud cover that Brendan was monitoring, we’d get a better view if we drove west. So it was on to Cleveland then further west to Lorain, Ohio. We ended up in Vermilion, Ohio, at a riverside park there, right in the direct path of our holy grail on this day, “totality.”
Our trek to get the best view of the moon’s shadow paid off. By 1:30 p.m., we had positioned ourselves in the direct path of totality when it would hit at 3:13 Eastern time. Another science geek we encountered (Xiantong Wang is his name), whose impressive equipment was nearby, snapped the spectacular shots you will see below.
By fortunate happenstance, we couldn’t have found a more accommodating or knowledgeable skygazing acquaintance than Xiantong (pronounced shen-tong). He’s a third-year doctoral student at the University of Michigan in astrophysics. Here’s a video of him explaining his work.
Xiantong graciously provided his images to us afterward. They are breathtaking. I’ll intersperse them throughout this report.
The photos below were taken as the eclipse was beginning. The filter on the camera revealed a far more dramatic scene than could be observed with the naked eye. The shot on the left was snapped at 2:06 p.m. (1 hour and 7 minutes before totality), and the second at 2:22 p.m. (51 minutes before totality).
Please read on if you’d like to see spectacular scenes of God’s stunning creation, as the shadow of the moon zoomed across North America on Monday, from Texas in the southwest moving northeast to Maine at about 1,500 m.p.h.
Among the more stunning aspects of creation is that the math is so finely calibrated. Here’s one mathematical improbability as it played out on Monday that I hadn’t previously understood.
The sun is 400 times the moon’s diameter, yet also about 400 times farther away than the moon. If it were not for this “coincidence” – I doubt it is one – the moon would not obscure the sun as perfectly as it does in a total solar eclipse.
Because of this 400 x 400 ratio, the moon and the sun appear nearly the same size in the sky when they are perfectly aligned, as they were on Monday. Perfect alignment between these moving celestial bodies is also required for the moon to block out the sun, resulting in four minutes of darkness along the path of totality, where we had situated ourselves and waited for the eclipse to commence.
We were in a recreational park awaiting the event with many others. We live in a fast world, the speed of which is ever escalating. People want everything F-A-S-T. The existence and omnipresence of social media has aggravated peoples’ need for speed.
But this enforced slowness, as the sound of the Vermilion River gurgled in the background, was pleasing. It couldn’t be rushed.
In the two photos below, the moon resembles Pac-Man, appearing to gobble up and devour the sun. The shot on the left was snapped at 2:42 p.m. (31 minutes before totality), and the second nine minutes later (22 minutes before totality).
As totality neared, Brendan began counting down the time according to the timer on the app he’d downloaded for the occasion.
“There’s only 13 minutes left now,” he said.
Then eight minutes, then six, then four, then two.
By the time totality had hit, with the moon almost entirely obscuring the sun – save for the gaseous envelope which surrounds our sun, visible only during a total solar eclipse – the temperature had dropped noticeably, by around 10 degrees.
People were giving full voice to the awesomeness of God’s creation. They were shrieking with laughter and exclamations of joy, punctuated by “oohs,” “wows,” and ahhs.” The wildlife surrounding us was more agitated. Dogs were barking in the distance.
“It’s a ring,” Brendan said. “You can see the corona.”
Immediately below, back in Pittsburgh on planet Earth, the Tan clan and some of our grandchildren were looking skyward to catch a glimpse of the celestial spectacular in the sky above.
Xiantong’s camera with a telephoto lens as long as my arm captured the sights below, which were largely invisible to human eyes.
During this remarkable event, we were all shrouded in darkness. That metaphor of being shrouded in darkness is a powerful one for any Christian to consider, for the Bible has much to say about the shadows that hold us in darkness.
So does my favorite Christian author, C. S. Lewis. He called the seen world the “Shadowlands.”
Years ago, a friend of mine was dying of brain cancer. As he neared death, Joe and I reflected often on a favorite passage of ours, 2 Corinthians 4:18, in which we are told to ignore our present circumstance and “fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
Pastor Nate Devlin read this same passage before the homily he delivered on Saturday in our sanctuary. The occasion was the memorial service for Joyce Dunlap, Jill Whitecap’s mother who passed away on March 25 at the age of 97.
Nate’s homily also dealt with the subject of shadows.
Here’s the story he told, about Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, the senior pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia from 1927 through 1960.
When Dr. Barnhouse’s wife was in her 30s, she was diagnosed with cancer from which she ultimately died. The death of his wife left him alone to care for their six-year-old daughter.
“Dr. Barnhouse had difficulty, tremendous difficulty, working through his own grief but the hardest part was … the comfort that he was trying to
give to his daughter. …
“Dr. Barnhouse later recalled that all of his education and theological training left him at a great loss.
“One day he and his daughter were standing on a busy corner at a downtown intersection waiting for the light to change and suddenly a very large truck sped by the corner and as it did, it briefly blocked out the sun and frightened the little girl.
“To comfort his daughter, Dr. Barnhouse picked her up and in that moment the wisdom of God broke through and he was able to share something with his daughter that he hadn’t been able to share before.
“He said to her: When you saw the truck pass, it scared you. Let me ask you, would you rather be struck by the truck or by the shadow of the truck?
“The little girl replied: the shadow.
“Dr. Barnhouse went on to explain to his daughter that when your mother died, she was only hit by the shadow of death because Jesus was hit by the truck.
“Jesus was hit by death so that we would only be hit by the shadow of death. This is our confidence. This is our strong hope even in the face of death. Christians have hope. Christians have confidence.
“That confidence was realized profoundly yet simply by Dr. Barnhouse and his daughter after the untimely death of his wife and her mother.
“That same confidence, that same hope, comes to us today as we remember the life of Joyce Dunlap. Joyce was not taken suddenly nor early in life, but the loss of her life is no less painful.
“And still we have hope.
“Still we have confidence in the Lord and Paul shares that confidence with us in our text.
“We do not lose heart.”
Friends, I implore you not to lose heart amid the shadowy and sinful lands we occupy. The dim images we see on earth are but a faint reflection of God’s perfect majesty, which shall be revealed to us in heaven.