Futility Closet

The Stars Align

Posted in Science & Math by Greg Ross on November 25th, 2005

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Film_eclipse_soleil_1999.jpg

It's only a happy accident that our moon "fits" over the sun's disc during a solar eclipse. The sun is 400 times the diameter of the moon, but it's nearly 400 times farther from Earth, so to us the two have almost exactly the same angular size.