부산대학교 도서관

This chapter brings our attention back to the larger context of human experience of the environment: the weather, commanding the unpredictable visibility or invisibility of the total solar eclipse. Fascinatingly, despite all human calculations of total solar eclipses across millennia, it is neither knowledge nor logistics, but rather the volatile weather, which has the final say about the eclipse-chaser’s day. Meteorology is generally known as the branch of science concerned with the processes and phenomena of the atmosphere, especially as a means of forecasting the weather. It is also involved with the study of the climate and weather of a region. The exciting dynamics of weather and total solar eclipses not only determine the experience of the viewer from Earth (as we have seen in the former chapters of human and animal responses to eclipses), they also have their own interactions, which Giles Harrison comes to consider as a big meteorological experiment set up and run by Nature herself.