ネイティブが教える英会話のジェムスクール☆Teachers☆

If you look at this picture, you might think the sun is just rising. Actually, this photo was taken in the middle of the day. During a total solar eclipse, the horizon appears to glow like a sunrise in every direction. What you see is not the rising sun, but the light from parts of the earth that are not shadowed by the moon.
Total solar eclipses, when the sun is completely blocked out by the moon, are extremely rare. According to wikipedia, they happen somewhere in the world every 18 months on average. However, if you stood in one place, you would only see the eclipse an average of one time every 400 years.
I'll be returning to my hometown in Illinois next month for a special event: to watch a total solar eclipse from my front yard, the same spot I watched it as a high school student only seven years ago. As the sky went dark and still, the crickets began to chirp, and the noisy birds went quiet. Three minutes later, it was daytime again.
It was a very special event for my town. Schools, offices and libraries handed out free eclipse glasses- which look like old paper 3d glasses with a very dark black plastic film. These glasses allow you to stare at the sun or a lightbulb, but you can't see anything else.
The city was preparing for tourists to come, something I'd never seen in my life. The local university thought the eclipse would attract enough extra people to host its first ever comic-con. And guess what? The tourists didn't come. But, it turns out, we already had enough comic fans in town without any tourists, and so the university continued to host comic-cons every year except 2020.