There’s an eclipse in October?!
Yup, 2 of them 😊 The solar eclipse is 10/14 and the lunar eclipse is 10/28
THERES TWO IN ONE MONTH?! 🤯
Lol, yeah 😆 The eclipses are related to the nodes of the moon (in some kind of way that I'm not really sure about and can't fully explain, but perhaps somebody else knows and will share, lol). But the eclipses happen twice per year in pairs. Earlier this year they were on 4/19 and 5/5. But they may or may not be visible depending on where you live in the world 😊 So eclipses are pretty special when we get to observe them, but far more common than most people realize 💛
If you consider Outer Space to be a Euclidean space, then the plane of the Earth-Moon system is inclined at roughly 1% to the plane of the Sun-Earth system. Since eclipses can only happen when the three objects are in a straight line, the month of one kind of eclipse is a pretty good time to look out for the other kind of eclipse. (Remember that a month is roughly one orbit of the Moon around the Earth - that's where the idea of a month comes from.) Although it doesn't always happen quite like that, and not as close together as you might expect, because of all the tiny details of the orbits.
Or to put it another way ......
Imagine a really big room with a beach ball in the middle, held magically in mid air at the height of a table. That represents the sun. Now imagine there is a round table near the edge of the room. In the middle of the table is a volleyball (Earth) and near the edge of the table is a tennis ball (Moon). The table goes round the beach ball, and the tennis ball goes round the edge of the table. (Not to scale, not even slightly.)
But! The table has legs of slightly different lengths, which mean it isn't quite flat. The balls would just roll off if you didn't hang to them. A plate would be ok though, the table has only a slight slope. Because the table is sloping, the three objects don't exactly line up every time the tennis ball is between the volleyball and the beachball: the tennis ball is usually slightly too high or slightly too low. The tennis ball is exactly in between the other balls (eclipse!) only when the table is 'pointing' in the right direction.
(Don't think about it toooooo hard, or the analogy will collapse.)
Eclipses in general are not rare, but being able to see them from a particular spot on the Earth is. And obviously they mostly happen over the sea.
@CuddleDuncan this was a cool explanation! Thank you 😊
@CuddleDuncan I've always wanted a geocentric orrery.