Skygazing is not merely a night-time pursuit, but partial solar eclipses can only be enjoyed if the clouds oblige, writes Eoin Butler
IT'S 9.45AM ON AUGUST 1ST, 2008, and a small group of observers are huddled into the corner of a car park in Phoenix Park. Decked out in an odd assortment of raincoats and sunglasses, they gaze skyward in patient anticipation. One of nature's most spectacular natural phenomena - a partial eclipse of the sun by the moon - should be visible in the sky about now. But while the precise cosmic alignment this entails is no doubt proceeding to plan, the gods have reckoned without another natural phenomenon just a few thousand metres above us: the Irish summer.
Suddenly, there's a break in the clouds and David Moore, the founder and chairman of Astronomy Ireland, excitedly calls out: "There it is! There's the eclipse!" I grab my sunglasses and scan the sky. A volunteer reminds us yet again not to stare directly at the sun. Chance would be a fine thing here, I can't even locate the bloody thing.
The woman next to me impresses upon her children the magnitude of what they're witnessing. "This," she announces, rather grandly, "is what we call a moment in time." Her eldest isn't exactly blown away. "All I see is some clouds," he says. And I'm ashamed to report, he isn't the only one.
"When you start to think about it all, it's just incredible," says Moore when I ask what first attracted him to astronomy. "We're on this tiny planet orbiting a star. That star, in turn, is just one of a couple of hundred billion stars in a particular galaxy; which, in turn, is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies created as a result of an explosion that happened about 14 billion years ago. When you consider these things, you start to contemplate the very meaning of existence."
I tell him I felt similarly about astronomy as a kid, but that as I got older it became harder in some ways to see how it was relevant to my life.
Moore patiently points to all the ways in which eclipses, alone, have proven influential factors in human history. Eclipses were, he contends, decisive factors in bringing about the fall of the Greek and Roman empires, in vindicating Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity and in shaping the current situation in the Middle East. I take him up on the last example.
A lunar eclipse, he explains, facilitated the capture of the city of Aqaba by Arab rebels under TE Lawrence in 1917. The subsequent British betrayal of the Arabs after the war was a major contributing factor to the mess the region finds itself in today. Well, QED.
For another Astronomy Ireland member, Eamon O'Fearchain, the attraction of the hobby is slightly different. "Every time I look up at Jupiter I just go wobbly," he admits. "I imagine Galileo in 1610, looking into a primitive telescope somebody has given him. They were using these telescope things for looking at terrestrial objects. Galileo was the first man to use one to look up into the heavens. So he saw a disc, Jupiter, and four points of light that turned out to be the moons of Jupiter. And he said, by God, there is something not right about the conventional wisdom."
O'Fearchain has his own slant on how astronomy might once again come alive for me. "The European Space Agency is looking for spacemen," he suggests. "You're about the right age." I laugh and tell him I'll see how the old journalism turns out before making any rash career decisions. It's interesting to note, however, that the US has recently committed to sending a manned flight to Mars by 2030. Therefore, the astronauts who will build the first settlements on the red planet have more than likely already been born. In fact, one of them may even be reading this article today. Now there's a really far out thought . . .