Did you see it?

Christian Hartmann/Reuters

Victor Hugo: "Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night."

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "A total solar eclipse is the most spectacular celestial phenomenon that earth-bound humans can behold."

I missed seeing yesterday’s (August 12, 2026) solar eclipse from where I live out west. The pictures online are stunning, especially those of the ‘diamond ring effect’ when the eclipse is at its totality. And hey, a trip to Spain, which seems to have been prime for viewing the celestial event, sure would have been nice. Where I live the skies are more prone to be filled with wildfire smoke than coronas but that seems to be the case even in Spain as some of the pictures actually show wildfire plumes in the background.  

Our species, Homo Sapiens, has always been fascinated with things in the sky. Though we have only been around a relatively short 300,000 years or so, anything happening overhead has always caught our attention. The Heavens have perhaps taken up a disproportionate amount of human attention for all of that time, and no wonder. The definition of the ‘heavens’ is loaded with some serious baggage: “the spiritual realm where God or deities reside and where righteous souls go after death. It also refers to the physical sky or firmament, and metaphorically describes a state of extreme happiness or peace.” Certainly the most prevalent expression I saw on the faces of people watching yesterday’s daytime sky show was one of awe. 

Like them, I’m routinely awed by what happens above my head. After the paltry three hundred or so thousand years we’ve cast our gaze to the heavens we now know that the heavens don’t begin and end with our tiny blue dot. Math was not my strong suit as a child but I have since come to appreciate the magnificence by which it can describe and explain much of what is happening “out there”. When I worked in Human Resources I had the opportunity to hold occasional workshops for employees who, like me, were not math wizards. Some were so intimidated by anything numerical they were unsure or afraid of how to even use a calculator. 

As an ice breaker in these sessions I’d start with a simple question as they sat in their chairs staring at me: “How fast are you moving?” Inevitably they’d respond that they weren’t moving at all - how could they be as they had their butts in seats wondering where all this was leading. With a couple of additional probing inquiries they acknowledged that they were indeed sitting in chairs on our planet earth, and yes, earth was in fact moving around the star (no pun intended) of yesterday’s cosmic show - the sun. Now we were getting somewhere.

With the tacit agreement that we were all in fact moving, albeit around some big object some 93 million miles distant, the original question still left them stumped: “How fast are we moving?” Using their calculators and the simple formula 2 Pi R that we all learned and promptly forgot in 6th grade, they were able to determine for themselves that we were actually moving at the rather astonishing rate of around 67,000 miles per hour! I’m sure a couple of them went home and challenged their kids with this exercise. 

Since then I’ve continued to be fascinated by, in the words of Maverick, "the need… the need for speed." So I thought, since I could not personally witness yesterday’s eclipse, I’d share some other speed numbers you may have never thought about but which you are a participant in every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every year of your life. To whit…

The totality of yesterday’s eclipse was at most 2 minutes and 18 seconds. In Spain, where the images that wowed me were taken, it was closer to one minute and 40 seconds. That length was largely determined by the speeds of the earth and moon relative to each other and from where on the round ball that is our home you were located. You perhaps already knew that. But how about this…

When you awake in the dark as the morning approaches how fast are you racing toward the sun in the east? Any guess? As with viewing the eclipse, it largely depends on your location on planet earth. If you were standing on the equator you’d be sprinting toward sunrise at about 1,040 mph. Where I live in Denver, Colorado I’d be chugging towards old Sol at the more sedate rate of 799 mph. That’s because we live on a rotating sphere (sorry flat earthers) and I’m at almost 39 degrees north latitude which means the circumference of my rotating circle is less than that of the equator. If I

happened to live a little farther north, say in Anchorage, Alaska I’d definitely be in the slow lane spinning along at just 500 mph, considerably slower than most jet aircraft. And though I’ve never been there, the folks in Longyearbyen, Norway (78 degree north latitude), which happens to be the northernmost city with a sizable population, are traipsing along slower than an Indianapolis race car at only 214 mph.  To take it to its northern- or southern-most extreme if you were at either pole your speed would actually be zero and all you would have to do is turn around to face the sun.

Something else you already know is that our sun and its solar system, including earth, is part of a larger group of stars called the Milky Way galaxy. What you may never have thought of is that like the earth and the other planets rotate around the sun, our sun in turn is rotating (orbiting) around the center of our galaxy at the center of which there is a massive black hole named Sagittarius A. So the same question I posed to our math-challenged employees years ago is still valid - how fast is our sun moving around Sagittarius A? The answer may astound you, but take a guess anyway. 

That bright object over our heads is really covering some ground, or more accurately, space. No Indy Cars or jet aircraft can even come close. Our sun, and thus you and I as heretofor oblivious passengers, are speeding around the galaxy at a whopping 514,000 miles per hour! That’s more than 142 miles every second. And lest you think you’ve got a round trip ticket, even at that speed it will take our ball of light about 240 MILLION years to complete the circle. Last time Sol was on this side of the galactic neighborhood was when dinosaurs first started to walk the earth. 

Okay, I know I’ve thrown a lot at you so just one more. Our Milky Way is just one of what scientists estimate to be more than 2 trillion (that’s 2 plus twelve zeros) galaxies, though the actual number may be infinite. Just like our sun and its planets are moving so too is our galaxy. You probably know that the universe is expanding but what it is expanding from is the spot of that original bang (or whatever it was). We can’t yet pinpoint the exact ‘spot’ of the Big Bang but what we can see is the background radiation that remains from that event and our galaxy is not dogging it in its journey away from its birthplace. Our humble galaxy is hitting the gas pedal at a literally astronomical speed of 1.3 MILLION miles per hour. That’s a fairly quick 361 miles per SECOND. 

To wrap up all this stuff to think about the next time you gaze at the sky I’ll leave you with a nerdy joke. If you think 361 miles per second is fast, keep in mind the next time you flick the switch at home that light is traveling at 186,000 miles per SECOND. So speed is all RELATIVE. With apologies to Mr. Einstein, we’ve got some catching up to do - speedwise. If you were actually present at the big bang with a stop watch, and didn’t move in the last 14 billion years, due to relativity and time dilation you’d be 30,500 years older than those of us fortunate enough to be traveling on planet earth. Catching up indeed. But that’s a story for a different day. Relatively speaking.

David Mabry: “Hold on tight.”