Solar eclipse 2024: Follow the path of totality: NPR

The hole's shadows show crescent shapes in 2019 as the Moon moves in front of the Sun, one of several unique phenomena we can see during a solar eclipse.

Louis Kwok/AFP via Getty Images

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Louis Kwok/AFP via Getty Images

The hole's shadows show crescent shapes in 2019 as the Moon moves in front of the Sun, one of several unique phenomena we can see during a solar eclipse.

Louis Kwok/AFP via Getty Images

If you live along the path of Monday's total solar eclipse and have any Christmas or Hanukkah gear, you might want to break it out. This celestial event will bring strange phenomena to our planet, including changes in how people see colors such as red, green and blue.

Here's a look at some of the unusual visual effects a solar eclipse brings to humans on Earth:

Red and green colors will look strange

This is partly due to the change in light when the moon blocks the sun, but also to the way our eyes and brains adapt to and interpret this change.

As light When dimmed, our eyes switch from photopic vision, which is linked to cone cells in the retina that provide full colors and fine detail, to binocular night vision, which relies on rod cells to detect objects in low light. In the middle is mesovision, the transitional stage where both rods and cones are active.

As light intensity diminishes during an eclipse, colors with longer wavelengths, such as red, will appear darker as the cones become less active. But because the bars are there Sensitive to shorter blue and green wavelengthsThese colors will have a chance to shine.

“This is very much a holistic thing,” said Erika Grundstrom, director of the astronomy laboratories At Vanderbilt Universityhe told NPR, ensuring that only people in the central path of the eclipse can witness the phenomenon.

She also said, you should not rely on just one red or green shirt to drive the effect.

“You have to have a lot of people (or colorful things) to see it,” Grundstrom said via email, adding: “The effect is the result of the sudden dimming and your sticks and cones trying to make sense of that dimming.”

It is called the Purkinje effect.

What?

purkinje effect, Also known as Purkinje phenomenon or transformationIt was documented about 200 years ago by Johannes Evangelista Purkinje, a Bohemian scientist who observed that when light passes through a prism under dimming conditions, the brightest point moves away from red and toward blue, on the shorter end of the wavelength spectrum.

The effect has been studied in the years since, including during the famous period 1919 total solar eclipse Which gave scientists important observations confirming Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

The dimming should become more apparent about 15 minutes before the total eclipse arrives. For many people, light takes on a metallic or silvery quality.

Some shadows will become sharper; Others will change

For one thing, your shade will be different.

“The change in lighting makes shadows appear more prominent on the ground, so it is possible to see individual hairs on your head in your shadow,” according to the report. European Space Agency.

If you see sunlight coming through narrow gaps in trees, you may notice lots of small crescents. As the European Space Agency says, “small holes in the leaves will act like multiple pinhole cameras, projecting an image of the Sun onto Earth.”

People in the path of the eclipse can also see strange flashes called shadow bands.

“A minute or two before totality, ripples of light may stream through the floor and walls as Earth's turbulent atmosphere refracts the last rays of sunlight,” the scientists say. EarthSky website It was said in 2017.

Other expected changes include a drop in temperature — and a pop of color in the sky that will make it seem as if you're seeing the sun set (or sunrise) across the horizon in a full 360 degrees.