Eclipse's wonder doesn't outshine God's

As great as all the coverage was this week on the total solar eclipse, I didn't hear anything about the maker of it all.

North Idaho wasn't in the high-end eclipse path — so I didn't really prepare for it. At the last minute Monday morning, my husband ran to the hardware store for a darker lens for the welding goggles, so I'd have safe viewing for whatever there was to see.

I set up a chair outside beneath the clouds, not too hopeful. They looked thick and dark. But it paid off. With thin clouds obscuring it, the sun was briefly visible enough that I caught the rounded, defined shadow of the moon on a tiny fraction of its surface.

For me, it was catch-your-breath amazing — even that little bit. I came in, the sky rolling with heavy clouds, and began following the NASA link our daughter had texted. It was an eclipse journey — state to state, the suspense building in each place as the sky darkened — the sun's light covered in the moon's shadow until that last sliver disappeared. Then Baily's beads — light shining through valleys on the edge of the moon for a few seconds — and the “diamond ring” — the single bright point of sunlight right before and after totality.

The broadcasters — and their guests, specializing in heliophysics (science of the sun and its influence in the solar system) — were beside themselves. One man had written a dissertation on the sun's corona. And now to see this outer part of the sun's atmosphere — usually hidden in the brilliant light of its surface — appearing in a flaming halo around the moon's shadow was the experience of a lifetime.

The gathered crowds clapped and cheered when that moment of totality first hit. The temperature dropped. Nighttime insects chirped. A bat flew by. The scenes were the same as the solar eclipse reached its zenith in state after state. Many people had traveled miles to witness such a spectacular awesome moment.

My own spirit flooded with joy and gratitude for such a world of wonder — our earth and its solar system. The sun is 93 million miles from Earth. Its radius is 432,000 miles. It takes only eight minutes and nineteen seconds for its light to reach Earth. The moon has a radius of 1,080 miles and is 238,900 miles away. Yet it aligned just right between our planet and its star to cast such a shadow it nearly erased it from the sky for those brief minutes.

As I watched entranced on my phone, I glanced up and saw it was lighter out my window. The curtain of clouds had parted. Could anything still be happening in my own backyard? I ran out, and there it was — a quarter of the sun in the moon's shadow. Much more humble than the total eclipse — but it didn't matter. It was the same shadow capturing the country.

To further understand a solar eclipse, the sun is 400 times wider than the moon — and 400 times farther from the Earth — is completely blocked when the new moon aligns between the Earth and the sun. There is a name for this — syzygy.

I call it God.