Eclipse: The Celestial Phenomenon Which Has Changed the Course of History

by Duncan Steel

A description of how the tracking of the eclipses over time has lead to some of the most dramatic of events.

Genres: Science, History, Nonfiction, Astronomy

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Dr Duncan I. Steel, BSc, MSc, DIC, PhD, FRAS is a British/Australian scientist. He is a world-renowned space science authority who has worked with NASA to assess the threat of comet and asteroid collisions and investigate technologies to avert such impacts. He was Associate Professor in space technology at the Joule Physics Laboratory, University of Salford (1999–2003). He is also the author of several science books on space, and regularly writes for The Guardian and various other newspapers and magazines. He was the discoverer of the main-belt asteroid 9767 Midsomer Norton, plus another eleven minor planets.

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

As my 21 August eclipse frenzy builds, I often force people near me to talk about it, whether they want to or not. This mostly lands on my wife, but she is nice and at least marginally also interested, so, still married. A while back we got to wondering how ancient people might have thought about eclipses, and by extension, how eclipse knowledge developed through history. It's not a straightforward technology enhancement kind of thing, where everyone does something the best way they know how, and an occasional innovator is like, "Ugh, bronze is so last millennium. Iron is IN", and eventually everyone else figures it out (or just burns your village and takes it from you). Eclipses are relatively uncommon, rarely happen in the same place, and require a good understanding of both time and space to nail down. Generations could go by since the last one, and the stories about that one time the sun up and disappeared in the middle of the day would arc from memory to "one of Grandma's stories" to legends. So we were curious how the big picture came together. We thought: there's probably a book about that.

There was! It's this book. (Also some other books, but I read this one).

The core of the book is just what I wanted: a scientific and historical overview of how civilizations eventually pieced together the nature and pattern of eclipses long before they had the math chops or heliocentric worldview needed to really know what was going on. It's actually more a triumph of recordkeeping than anything, until Newton and Copernicus came along. But really interesting to learn how people figured it out, as well as some of the cultural effects of eclipses throughout history. Some of the anecdotes are fascinating--notably a story about how Columbus leveraged foreknowledge of a lunar eclipse to prevent his native hosts from kicking him out of Jamaica.

As a whole volume, I did find it a bit slow at times in its quest for completeness, especially as it traced through some of the better-documented recent eclipses. Seems like some chapters could have been left behind, or certainly tightened up to improve the narrative. But your mileage may vary. (Though worth noting that the listed 492 pages is actually under 400 if you don't read the extensive notes or parse the detailed mathematical appendix.)

[Ivan Bustamante · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book because the author explained the story on how humans along time ago discovered eclipse and how over time people learned more and more information about eclipse. After a few years have passed people discovered that there are different types of eclipse for example a solar eclipse.