とくに何の準備もしてなかったのですが、一応いつもより２０分早く起きて、急いでシャワーを浴びて朝ご飯を食べながらサングラスを４個掛け、ベランダにしゃがんで空を見上げました。
生まれて初めてだったので、一応見ておかなきゃ、と思って。
We had a total eclipse this morning in Japan. The kind with a full round ring is said to be very rare, only happens in Japan every 300 years or so.
I didn't really prepare anything, but just got up 20 minutes earlier, took a quick shower and went out to my balcony with a cereal bowl and looked up the sky.
It was my first time seeing an eclipse, and I could not waste the chance.
日蝕を見てみたかった理由は、ほら、良く歴史の本を読んでいると「日蝕が天変地異や不吉な前触れだと人々が思い込んだ」と言ったような記述があるじゃないですか。実際に本当にそんなに不吉の前触れに見えるのかどうか、どうしても確かめたかったのです。どんな神秘的な様子に見えるのか。
The reason I wanted to see the eclipse was not because it was the once-in-a-few-hundred-years opportunity, but because I wanted to know why people in ancient times were scared of eclipses. When you read history books, you often come across expressions like "people thought it was a bad omen". I wanted to see how ominous an eclipse might look like. How mysterious it might be.
どう見たって太陽を徐々に何かが隠しているわけで、論理的に考えたら月しかあり得ない。いくら太陽が地球の周りを回っていると信じていたとしても、空に太陽と月があることは知っているのだから、それくらい分かるよねー。
うーむ、なんで古代の人が日蝕を怖がったのか分からない。。。。
という発見＆気付きがあった今朝でした。面白かった。
Well, for one thing, the sun was smaller and further away than I had thought :) We don't really look at the sun that often and I don't really think about its size, but in my mental image, the sun is like a huge fireball...lol When you actually see the sun directly, the ring was pretty small. And it's pretty obvious but it doesn't get dark all of a sudden.
It's hard to miss the evidence that something is gradually covering the sun, and logically speaking, that "something" has to be the moon. Even though people believed that the earth was the center of the universe, they had to know there are the sun and the moon in the sky. They could've done the math, right?
I really couldn't get why those people used to be scared of the eclipses...
That's what I found out this morning. Pretty interesting.
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