Eclipse related SF?

[Peter Trei]

What stories exist where eclipses, whether partial or total, are an important
part of the plot?

Here's a few starters (just from my head, no searching)

* A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Twain)
* Transit of Earth (Clarke)
* Nightfall (Asimov)
* Ladyhawke (movie, story by Edward Khmara)

They're a bit of a trope in fantasy, usually as a time when special
magic can happen. In SF, less so.

More examples found at
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TotalEclipseOfThePlot
and
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConvenientEclipse

pt

[Jack Bohn]

"And Come from Miles Around" by Connie Willis is highly recommended.

Any habitable body around a gas giant gets a description of how the sky looks to the inhabitants, none where the plot hinges on it come to mind.

I think there was a James Blish story where a pseudo-scientific explanation of why people were most creative in the middle of the night caused an artists' colony to be planted on one of the moons of Jupiter on the theory that when Jupiter eclipsed the Sun that was the deepest midnight in the Solar System.

--
-Jack

[Jack Bohn]

On the movie front, an actual eclipse was filmed for some biblical epic, and run during the Crucifixion.

In "Forbidden Planet, " the C-57D "arranges its own eclipses." Editing for time left it not-quite-clear that they had come out of FTL too close to the star and were overheating. "2001" showed many syzygies at turning points. In "Phase IV," the ants began taking over after some event that looks for all the world like the Sun coming dorectly between the Moon and the Earth. (Made by a Main Title designer, not a scientist. )

--
-Jack

[Sjouke Burry]

"the city of the Chasch" from Vance.
when the moon BRAZ eclipsed the moon AZ,
the leader of the tribe would be executed.
Leader Traz Onmale escaped instead together with Reith.

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

In article <59936bb9$0$1709$e4fe...@textnews.kpn.nl>,

DC's "Eclipso"
--
------
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

[bill van]

In article <evh9mr...@mid.individual.net>,

Georges Remi (pen name Hergé) in his Tintin books played with a few SF
themes, notably in the "Destination Moon" and "Explorers on the Moon"
titles. In "Prisoners of the Sun", Tintin uses his knowledge of a
pending full eclipse to hoodwink the Incas who plan to execute him and
his friends.
--
bill

[D B Davis]

Did anyone mention _Somnium_ (Kepler, 1634)? _Somnium_ (Latin for "The
Dream") is one of the first examples of "science fiction before the
genre" in the words of _The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction_
(James and Mendlesohn).

... There is no doubt that evil spirits are called powers of
darkness and of air. You would therefore regard them as
sentenced and, so to say, banished to the shadowy regions,
to the cone of the earth's shadow. Hence, when this cone of
shadow touches the moon, then the daemons invade the moon
in a mass, using the cone of shadow as a ladder. On the
other hand, when the cone of the moon's shadow touches the
earth in a total eclipse of the sun, the daemons return
through the cone to the earth ...

Thank you,

--
Don

[Kevrob]

That reminds me of Zelazny's "Jack of Shadows"....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_Shadows

..whose hero is most powerful in the borderland between night
and day, on a tidally locked world.

Kevin R

[alie...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, August 15, 2017 at 6:35:39 AM UTC-7, Peter Trei wrote:
> What stories exist where eclipses, whether partial or total, are an important
> part of the plot?

Asimov's _The Backward Look_.


Mark L. Fergerson

[Ahasuerus]

On Tuesday, August 15, 2017 at 9:35:39 AM UTC-4, Peter Trei wrote:
> What stories exist where eclipses, whether partial or total, are an important

> part of the plot? [snip]

"Eclipse Bears Witness" (1941) by John Russell Fearn, originally as by
"Ephriam Winiki": http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?853144 . It's
very much a work of its time with comments like "Incidentally, she has
the secret of perfect space-travel, such as her father used..."

[Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)]

Not published, but the VERY FIRST SF story I ever submitted was a
short-short (I think about 500 words) about the last-ever eclipse.



--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Website: http://www.grandcentralarena.com Blog:
http://seawasp.dreamwidth.org

[Gene Wirchenko]

On Wed, 16 Aug 2017 19:07:02 -0400, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"
<sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:

[snip]

> Not published, but the VERY FIRST SF story I ever submitted was a
>short-short (I think about 500 words) about the last-ever eclipse.

You tease!

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

[Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)]

You're not missing much, I wrote it when I was like 11.

[Jack Bohn]

Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) wrote:
> On 8/16/17 9:48 PM, Gene Wirchenko wrote:

> > On Wed, 16 Aug 2017 19:07:02 -0400, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)" wrote:
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> >> Not published, but the VERY FIRST SF story I ever submitted was a
> >> short-short (I think about 500 words) about the last-ever eclipse.
> >
> > You tease!
>
> You're not missing much, I wrote it when I was like 11.

Hmm... I don't see you as writing a "mood piece," nor a page of text in support of some horrible, horrible pun... What would cause a "last-ever eclipse"? (One that we would know about in advance; Space: 1999 had a last-ever eclipse, but they didn't realize it at the time.)

The Moon about to be destroyed or disassembled, or sent off somewhere, the Earth about to take off for somewhere, or be destroyed so the Moon can fly free, the Sun about to leave the Earth, or be destroyed or disassembled, or re-formed into a tube like a fluorescent light. Or maybe the eclipse is not so noticeable because the Sun is supplemented by orbiting mirrors or fusion lights or the stellarification of Jupiter. (A habitable body around a gas giant in a binary system may get eclipses where the giant covers one then both of the stars. If we support colonies on the moons of Jupiter or Saturn with large mirrors to reflect sunlight and heat onto them, they would have the primary eclipse the Sun, then see the other lights in the sky dramatically wink out as they, too, entered shadow.)

Of course, it could be something as simple as the Moon's moving farther away and the Sun getting bigger bringing the last totality, but I expect something super-scientific from Spoor, even if it's only as scientific as Superman. ...X-ray vision! Or, better, neutrino vision. A neutrino detector is built small enough to be installed in our bodies, but most of humanity decides to put off getting it until watching one last eclipse naturally, in the various electromagnetic frequencies.

--
-Jack

[Jack Bohn]

I, Jack Bohn wrote:

> I think there was a James Blish story where a pseudo-scientific explanation of why people were most creative in the middle of the night caused an artists' colony to be planted on one of the moons of Jupiter on the theory that when Jupiter eclipsed the Sun that was the deepest midnight in the Solar System.

I can't find this story among the Blishes. My next nominee for author would be Christopher Anvil, who wrote another story I'd long misattributed to Clarke.

--
-Jack

[Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)]

On 8/18/17 12:22 PM, Jack Bohn wrote:
> Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) wrote:
>> On 8/16/17 9:48 PM, Gene Wirchenko wrote:
>>> On Wed, 16 Aug 2017 19:07:02 -0400, "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)" wrote:
>>>
>>> [snip]
>>>
>>>> Not published, but the VERY FIRST SF story I ever submitted was a
>>>> short-short (I think about 500 words) about the last-ever eclipse.
>>>
>>> You tease!
>>
>> You're not missing much, I wrote it when I was like 11.
>
> Hmm... I don't see you as writing a "mood piece," nor a page of text in support of some horrible, horrible pun... What would cause a "last-ever eclipse"?

The moon is slowly drifting away from the Earth, as far as I know.
Eventually it will reach the point that even at its closest approach, it
will not be able to produce totality. There will therefore at some point
be a final total eclipse of the sun.

I remember it as simply a description of the event from the point of
view of a father with his son, and the father's reflection that it would
never happen again. But then he looks up for an instant at the
momentarily revealed stars and thinks that there might be another
place... out there... where such a sight could be seen.

So "mood piece", yes, I think.

[Dimensional Traveler]

The last I've heard is yes, the moon is currently slowly expanding its
orbit but at some point in the future will reverse and begin contracting
its orbit (I can't remember why) until it reaches the Roche Limit. At
that point everything on Earth has a really bad millennia as the
deorbiting pieces of the moon sterilize Earth.

--
Inquiring minds want to know while minds with a self-preservation
instinct are running screaming.

[Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)]

Wow. How does that reversal happen? And at what point? I mean, will the
Sun have already gotten in its sterilizing innings by turning to a small
Red Giant, or not?

[Dimensional Traveler]

I don't remember the reason given for the reversal. The break up of
Luna was supposed to happen well before the Red Giant phase.

[Robert Carnegie]

I don't see it happening - I'm pretty sure that the
Moon was supposed to draw on Earth's angular momentum
indefinitely, which AIUI is why it's going away.
I remember Charlie Brown explaining that to Linus.
And I think that astronomers are carefully measuring
the distance anyway...

Maybe there's a Randall Munroe article about "What if
the Moon was getting closer with every orbit instead
of further away?"

[Peter Trei]

As long as the Earth spins faster than the moon orbits, it transfers momentum to the moon, causing it to gain energy, and orbit higher. This also slow the earths rotation. Eventually earth is tidally locked to the moon, with the same faces of earth and moon facing each other, as pPluto And Charon do now. This will take about 50 billion years, and the system will have had other challenges in that time.

After that, I don't know why things would reverse,

[Kevrob]

So, "a hard rain's gonna fall," to crib from Dylan and Stephenson. :)

Kevin R

[Robert Woodward]

In article <26ca9f0f-c6b7-4863...@googlegroups.com>,
Peter Trei <pete...@gmail.com> wrote:

(massive snip; started with Ryk (i.e., Sea Wasp) describing a short
short he wrote when he was in grade school about the last solar eclipse)

>
> As long as the Earth spins faster than the moon orbits, it transfers momentum
> to the moon, causing it to gain energy, and orbit higher. This also slow the
> earths rotation. Eventually earth is tidally locked to the moon, with the
> same faces of earth and moon facing each other, as pPluto And Charon do now.
> This will take about 50 billion years, and the system will have had other
> challenges in that time.
>
> After that, I don't know why things would reverse

The reversal happens because the solar tide will try to tidal lock the
Earth to the Sun. This results in angular momentum being transferred
back to the Earth (note that since the Earth's rotation is still being
slowed by the sun, it will always be rotating slower than the Moon's
revolution time) until final catastrophe.

--
"We have advanced to new and surprising levels of bafflement."
Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan describes progress in _Komarr_.
—-----------------------------------------------------
Robert Woodward robe...@drizzle.com

[Greg Goss]

Wasn't there something in one of the Diaspar novels about equipment
that was mythologically used for a giant space battle, but was really
involved in dealing with a falling moon? And the resulting
destruction was somehow the reason that all of Earth except the two
oases was desert.

--
We are geeks. Resistance is voltage over current.

[David DeLaney]

The expanding of the orbit has to do with transferring angular momentum from
Earth to Moon until earth's rotation period is locked to the Moon's the way the
Moon's is currently locked (modulo libration) to Earth's. Since the Moon is
already tide-locked, the only place the added vec-J has to go is into
increasing the Moon's orbital radius. And it gets transferred because of ...
friction with the earth caused by the lunar tides, slowing down Earth's day.

The later contracting takes much longer, I believe, and is basically friction
with the Solar atmosphere stealing the angular momentum of the tide-locked
pair. I _think_ I recall this taking long enough that the Sun will be past red
giant phase?

Dave, this has been a pre-eclipse Science Minute. ObSF: "his sign, the eclipse"
--
\/David DeLaney posting thru EarthLink - "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
my gatekeeper archives are no longer accessible :( / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

[David DeLaney]

On 2017-08-20, Robert Woodward <robe...@drizzle.com> wrote:
> The reversal happens because the solar tide will try to tidal lock the
> Earth to the Sun. This results in angular momentum being transferred
> back to the Earth (note that since the Earth's rotation is still being
> slowed by the sun, it will always be rotating slower than the Moon's
> revolution time) until final catastrophe.

Oh right, duh, that'll happen faster thn solar-atmosphere friction induced
slowdown. I should have remembered.

Dave, Solar tides are same order of magnitude now as lunar because: a) same
angular diameter in sky (no rly) and b) Sun overall less dense than Moon but
not by a factor of ten. I think.

[Robert Carnegie]

On Monday, 21 August 2017 02:19:02 UTC+1, David DeLaney wrote:
> On 2017-08-20, Robert Woodward <robe...@drizzle.com> wrote:
> > The reversal happens because the solar tide will try to tidal lock the
> > Earth to the Sun. This results in angular momentum being transferred
> > back to the Earth (note that since the Earth's rotation is still being
> > slowed by the sun, it will always be rotating slower than the Moon's
> > revolution time) until final catastrophe.
>
> Oh right, duh, that'll happen faster thn solar-atmosphere friction induced
> slowdown. I should have remembered.
>
> Dave, Solar tides are same order of magnitude now as lunar because: a) same
> angular diameter in sky (no rly) and b) Sun overall less dense than Moon but
> not by a factor of ten. I think.

Um... okay. Tidal force goes by inverse cube law,
and the mass of a body is density times diameter
cubed, so, bodies with the same /angular/ diameter -
yup.

<http://scienceprimer.com/lunar-and-solar-tides>
says that the sun makes a water bulge in Earth's
ocean about half the size of the one due to the
moon. Wikipedia explains that what water does on
the shoreline is a lot more complicated, involving
geography. But on the face of it, the big tide
(moon plus sun) is "about" three times as large as
the little one (moon minus sun). Maybe.

[Jack Bohn]

Discussion of the "diamond ring" during coverage of the eclipse reminded me of a 1970 painting:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?293680

An L5 colony would see the Moon the same size as we do, its "eclipse seasons" would be 60 degrees or 2 months different, though, right? The orbital tilt would also make it infrequent?

But this is a painting of a Stanford Torus. In addition to a larger radius and slower rotation, they were also in a lower orbit, weren't they? 2:1 or 3:1 orbital resonance with the Moon? It would be even more occasional that the Moon would be seen of the right size for the diamond ring. (Then there's the question of how dark it can get before the lights inside reflect off the window drowning out the sight.)

--
-Jack

[tsbr...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, August 16, 2017 at 4:07:07 PM UTC-7, Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) wrote:
> On 8/15/17 9:35 AM, Peter Trei wrote:
> > What stories exist where eclipses, whether partial or total, are an important
> > part of the plot?
> >
> > Here's a few starters (just from my head, no searching)
> >
> > * A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Twain)
> > * Transit of Earth (Clarke)
> > * Nightfall (Asimov)
> > * Ladyhawke (movie, story by Edward Khmara)
> >
> > They're a bit of a trope in fantasy, usually as a time when special
> > magic can happen. In SF, less so.
> >
> > More examples found at
> > http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TotalEclipseOfThePlot
> > and
> > http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConvenientEclipse
> >
> > pt
> >
>
> Not published, but the VERY FIRST SF story I ever submitted was a
> short-short (I think about 500 words) about the last-ever eclipse.

Why was it the last ever eclipse?

[Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)]

Because the moon had moved far enough out from the Earth to no longer
completely cover the Sun.

[Gutless Umbrella Carrying Sissy]

"Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)" <sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote in
news:onicof$5ej$3...@dont-email.me:

That'd be the last *total* eclipse, then, but not the last eclipse,
wouldn't it?

--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Anthony Nance]

This makes me wonder: When would we change from "eclipse" to "transit"?
And is there something in between?

Tony

[Paul Colquhoun]

An Annular Eclipse is when there is a small ring of the Sun visible
around the edge of the Moon's disk, so I think that counts as the first
step from "eclipse" to "transit".


--
Reverend Paul Colquhoun, ULC. http://andor.dropbear.id.au/
Asking for technical help in newsgroups? Read this first:
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#intro

[Robert Carnegie]

And of course we already get annular eclipses sometimes.

[Wayne Brown]

That will take a very long while. The moon is moving away from the
Earth at about the same rate that your fingernails grow. So if you
can visualize how long your fingernails would be if you had never
trimmed them, that's about the distance the moon has moved away from
us during your lifetime.

--
F. Wayne Brown <fwb...@bellsouth.net>

ur sag9-ga ur-tur-še3 ba-an-kur9
"A dog that is played with turns into a puppy." (Sumerian proverb)