Why Do Eclipses Occur?

Why Do Eclipses Occur?

A lot of people find it a spectacle every time an eclipse is concluded to appear at one point during the year. Sometimes, these natural occurrences are so sensationalized that people actually stop doing what they’re doing at mid-day to wait out the happening of an eclipse at a given time. For some eclipse fanatics who people call eclipse chasers, they would even travel to the most remote of locations to experience and capture every moment of a particular eclipse.

So what really happens to during an eclipse? How does it occur and why? In layman’s, eclipses occur when one exorbitant object gets in the way of another that the second object blocks out the light produced by the sun from reaching the earth. In the case of a solar eclipse, our very own moon passes in between the earth and the sun that the moon either partially or fully covers the earth’s view of the sun.

For the case of the lunar eclipses, it is the earth this time that passes between the moon and the sun. This way, the moon becomes darker as we view it from the earth. Though the sun and the moon are of the same size, there are many variations of this kind of eclipses depending which part of the astronomical object is blocked by the other. Another explanation to this is because the orbit of the moon is not a perfect circle and is not as perfectly aligned to the earth’s orbit around the sun.

Since these two types of eclipses are considered natural phenomena, they happen very rarely. What make it even more rare are the occurrences of total eclipses. It is a once in a lifetime event wherein the earth the sun and the moon aligns with each other in orbit with great totally.