The Peru Gazette

Simon Steel Photo

Simon Steel is an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. After talking about the eclipse at SUNY Plattsburgh on the morning of April 8, he set up his telescope in Peru, his wife Paula’s hometown, to share the experience with family and friends.  Peru residents know Paula as Paula Kienert.

Simon Steel kindly wrote the following paragraph about a total solar eclipse.

“A total Solar eclipse is one of the most amazing cosmic spectacles you can experience. Although only a “once in a lifetime experience” if you’re unable to jump on a plane (eclipses happen roughly every six months somewhere in the world), it is a celestial event unmatched by any other planet in our solar system, or possibly our entire galaxy.  By a freak of nature, our small rocky moon happens to be just the proper distance away, and its disc appears to be precisely the same size as the disc of our gigantic star, the Sun, 400 times further away.  This cosmic coincidence would make Planet Earth a galactic tourist destination, maybe even making the cover of the “Lonely Planets Galactic Edition.”  The next time a total eclipse passes over the continental US is in 2044.  There will be others around the world in the meantime, and as their images are, in turn, splashed across the headlines, it will remind us of where we were on that sunny April afternoon in 2024.”