k called Baily's beads are formed. These beads are actually the last few rays of sunlight shining through the valleys on the edge of the Moon and are seen for up to 15 seconds before the eclipse is total. When all but one point is remaining it is called a diamond effect. The final spark of light before the outline of the Moon blocks the Sun.
Suddenly the sky is dark leaving only the corona of the Sun. A halo of light that shines in all directions around the darken body of the Sun. It looks and feels like nighttime and the plants and animals respond accordingly. Birds stop singing and may go to roost and daytime flowers begin to close. The air cools as the temperature drops. All of nature reacts as if it were nightfall. Then as the Moon continues its path all the events that preceded the total eclipse are viewed in reverse. First Baily's beads are seen and then the thin crescent of the Sun. Gradually daylight returns as more of the Sun is revealed as the Moon passes it.
There is a specific pattern to an eclipse and it is calculated on those times when the new Moon is near one of its nodes, or two points where the Moon's orbit intersects the plane of the Earth's orbit, the ecliptic. The new Moon must be close enough to the ecliptic plane so that so that its shadow will touch some part of Earth. When the new Moon appears with in 18-3/4 days before or after the alignment of the node, a solar eclipse will take place. This creates a 37-1/2 day time window for eclipse, called the eclipse season to occur. The lunar nodes are not quite stationary but near enough that the an eclipse year of about 346.6 days has been established and a pattern of eclipse can be established using a 18.6 day earlier date from the previous year's eclipse season. It was the Babylonian astronomers of ancient times that discovered this repetition of cycles of exactly 223 months or a period of 18 years 11-1/3 days between eclipse years. The repetition of eclipses follows a fairly regular pattern in time but not so the given place on Earth. The average is 360 years for a total eclipse to be seen at the same location, with some areas seeing eclipses more frequently and other over even greater periods of time.
Imagine what a total eclipse was like for the people of ancient times. To some it was an omen of some natural disaster that was to befall them or the death of a ruler. The Chinese thought it was an invisible dragon trying to consume the Sun. They made a lot of noise and beating of drums and pans to scare the dragon away and restore the light and even as recent as the last century the Chinese Imperial Navy fired its ceremonial guns during an eclipse to frighten off the invisible dragon. The dragon theory seemed popular also in India where people immersed themselves in water up to their necks, believing this act of worship would help the Sun and Moon defend themselves against the dragon. In Japan the wells were covered so as to prevent poison from dropping into them from the darkened sky. In Tahiti the eclipse was seen as the Sun and Moon making love. In Arctic America the Eskimos, Aleuts and Tlingits believed that the Sun and Moon momentarily left the skies to insure all was as it should be on Earth.
The people who constructed Stonehenge in England, some believe them to be Druids, had been able to mark the summer solstice the longest day of the year through the alignment of the massive heel stone, thus marking the beginning of each year. By counting the days between the annual alignments they could determine the length of the year, mark holidays and seasonal festivals and ensure the timely planting and harvesting of crops. However to predict eclipses they had to know two other cycles one the length of the lunar month which is simply the number of days between one full Moon and the next. The other was more complex as it was the knowledge of the rotation of the two invisible points in space where the Moon's orbit tilted at a slight angle intersects the plane of the Earth's orbit. There is evidence showing that the builders of Stonehenge did have the knowle