Eclipse unleashes good vibes in troubled times

It’s comforting, in these polarized times, to look forward to a rapidly approaching event the whole country can agree on. The eclipse. It’s all good news, starting with the fact that we can all agree the eclipse is happening. There haven’t been any shouts of “fake news” about the eclipse. No one has refused to believe it’s happening because the scientists said so. Whew. The entire country is eagerly awaiting Monday, Aug. 21. The moon will pass between the sun and the Earth, blocking all or part of the sun as it moves over the United States.

According to NASA’s website, the first point of contact will be in Lincoln Beach, Ore., at 9:05 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, and “totality” — the soultingling moment when the moon blocks out the sun completely — will be at 10:16 a.m. The stars will come out. It should be glorious.

From there the eclipse will pass over the continental U.S. in a thin band of dark light. It leaves the U.S. near Charleston, S.C., at 2:48 Eastern Daylight Time.

There hasn’t been a total solar eclipse visible in the country since 1979, and a total eclipse that crosses the entire continental U.S. is even rarer.

So plenty of people are planning to make the most of it. Tourism officials are reporting a bonanza of visitors and their dollars in the cities and towns where the eclipse will be visible. Many campgrounds in the eclipse’s path have been fully booked for years.

Sadly, I won’t be among these eclipse tourists.

I’ll be right here in California, which isn’t in the path of the total eclipse. I’ll spend Monday working away on a computer. Same as every day.

I do plan to watch the eclipse’s path on the live stream the Exploratorium has created in partnership with NASA. (Watch along with me at www. exploratorium.edu/eclipse)

I’ll probably go outside, too, for the few minutes when we’re likely to see the most.

“In San Francisco, we’ll be able to see about 75 percent totality if we have clear skies,” said Rose Petroff, project coordinator for the Exploratorium’s Teacher Institute. “So it’s definitely worth going outside. Just make sure you wear the protective eclipse glasses! The peak time in San Francisco will be 10:15 a.m.”

While the eclipse is happening, I’ll think about how happy I am to be living right now — in a time where we’ve learned enough about the astronomy behind a total eclipse to be thrilled, not terrified, by one.

Many ancient cultures had myths about eclipses, and all of them were wild. In China, it was said that a dragon had devoured the sun; Mayans blamed snakes for gobbling it up. Vikings blamed the phenomenon on giant wolves racing across the sky, chasing the sun and the moon.

To be fair, there were a few places where a solar eclipse was seen as an auspicious event — the Tahitians, for one, believed it represented an amorous moment between the sun and the moon. (Tahiti just zoomed to the top of my list of vacation spots; the island sounds much more relaxing than fighting all of those eclipse tourists on the highway anyway.)

But for the most part, an eclipse was seen as a portent of doom, and we take that forward with us into these times. The trippiest moment in the book of Revelation, a book that’s pretty much all trippy moments, comes after John of Patmos has watched the six seals on the book of judgment tear open. The sun darkens, the earth shakes, and the world’s kings leave their thrones.

In fact, if there is a common denominator around eclipse history, all around the world, it’s that they’ve historically been seen to be particularly dangerous for leaders who have lost their popularity among the populace.

The list of leaders who left the stage around the time of an eclipse is a long one. The death of the Prophet Mohammed’s son, Ibrahim, allegedly coincided with an eclipse in 632. Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son, died in the aftermath of eclipse terror in May 840, and England’s King Henry I died shortly after an eclipse that supposedly had ill portents in 1133. Louis XIV, the Sun King, died shortly after an eclipse in Paris. Coincidence? Scientifically, I’m sure it is. But you never know. As happy as I am that we can now understand eclipses as scientific phenomena, it’s also fun — and wise — to appreciate our collective cultural memory of the eclipse as something with the power to unleash unexpected cosmic forces, wild turns of events that can be neither delayed nor denied. We’ll see what happens. Wear your glasses, and enjoy the show. Caille Millner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cmillner@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @caillemillner

An eclipse was seen as a portent of doom, and we take that forward with us into these times.