Solar Eclipses

This is a crocheted solar eclipses hot mat available from shirret.com, a site for scrap material crocheting.


I've had an interest in eclipses ever since my third grade class built viewing boxes to view a partial eclipse in May of 1994. Recently I my interest was piqued after reading a short story which described hysterical screaming in Japan by people who had assembled to view an eclipse. Hysterical screaming is a common reaction to eclipses, even those which have been predicted and expected in modern times. This BBC article from 1999 reports on a different type of hysteria during the preparations for the eclipses in England from the same year.



This map is originally from this NASA site. The differing widths of the eclipse path are from the distortion of the projection. Eclipses maintain a path of about 300km.

An interactive map of all eclipses, full and partial, is available at this site.