PARIS, Dec 1: In an age that scoffs at superstition, there will occur on Wednesday (Dec 4) a sight guaranteed to tingle the spine of the most hardened skeptic: a total solar eclipse.

In a celestial show that reaches into the soul to inspire dread and awe, the Moon will inch across the face of the Sun and briefly blot out its life-giving light.

Starting in the southern Atlantic at 0550 GMT, the shadow will race eastwards, streak across southern Africa and head across the Indian Ocean before traversing South Australia.

Three hours and 21 minutes and 12,000 kilometres from the start of its trek, the umbra will expire unseen, in the wastes of the Outback.

For those people in the path of the “totality,” the Sun will be completely obscured, appearing as a dark disc with a halo of gold, blazing in a sky of indigo.

The temperature will suddenly drop. Animals will fall silent or chatter excitedly or scurry about. Birds may fly around in confusion and bats emerge from their roosts, tricked by the instant twilight. The stars and planets will appear — cloud cover allowing.

Then, a few minutes later, as if in a miracle, the Sun will gradually reappear.

Ever since hominids started to ponder the heavens, eclipses have been regarded with fear and the will of the divine.

They have been associated with war, crop failure, plagues, the downfall, death and advent of kings and prophets, such as the crucifixion of Christ and birth of Muhammed.

For the ancient Chinese, the eclipse was a Sun-eating dragon, which had to be scared away by banging on pots and drums.

An eclipse signalled a break with the conventional or God-given order. Even the word comes from a Greek word, “ekleipsis,” meaning to fail or be abandoned.

“The Sun has perished out of heaven, and an evil mist hovers over all,” Homer wrote in The Odyssey.

Eclipses are no longer dramatically unexpected, thanks to computers that can easily calculate when the Earth, Moon and Sun will be in conjunction.

According to astronomer Fred Espanak, Wednesday’s lunar shadow will make landfall at 0557 GMT in Angola — bizarrely, the location where an eclipse occurred on June 21 last year.

The shadow, 60kms across, will kiss the Angolan/Zambian border before entering northern Botswana at 0609 GMT.

It crosses into Zimbabwe and then northern South Africa at 0619 GMT, and then into Mozambique, finally leaving Africa at 0628 GMT on a 90-minute haul across the Indian Ocean.

It touches South Australia, where the last large community to enjoy it will be the coastal town of Ceduna. In the remaining seconds, the shadow, increasingly elliptical as the alignment comes to an end, will zip across 900 kms of Australian Outback.

The maximum duration for the eclipse will be two minutes four seconds — but at a location far out to sea, around 2,000kms southeast of Madagascar.

Eclipse-watchers on land will be best-placed in the northern part of South Africa’s Kruger National Park, where totality will last 1 minute 25 seconds. In Ceduna, totality will last just 33 seconds.

Total solar eclipses draw a growing tribe of people hooked on celestial thrills, some of them veterans of half a dozen such events or more.

Scientists, too, eagerly follow eclipses. They may know now when these stunning phenomena will occur, but there remain many things that are enigmatic.

Zoologists are intrigued as to how eclipses affect the circadian clock and magnetic compass in birds and animals — the body mechanisms that affect sleep and direction.

Eclipse observers have often reported feeling an odd breeze during totality, and this anecdotal evidence has now been confirmed in a study of the total eclipse of Aug 11, 1999, which traversed heavily-populated parts of Europe, the Middle East and South Asia.

Weather instruments along its path detected subtle changes in air pressure as the Sun’s rays were blocked off, according to the research, published in November in Britain’s Proceedings of the Royal Society.—AFP