I remember the day of the 1970 eclipse. I was 10 years old. I was riding my bicycle outside in the street. Adults were telling the kids not to look directly at the sun. No one had special eclipse glasses. Inside my home, the television was reporting on the eclipse as it moved northeast along the east coast.

This is the cover of the New York Times on Sunday March 8, 1970, a day after the total eclipse of Saturday, March 7, 1970.

Eclipses are an amazing celestial event. It's either a cosmic coincidence or an amazing detail in the creator's design, but the size of the disk of the sun and the disk of the moon is exactly the same from the point of view of a human looking at this phenomenon from the surface of planet earth. This causes the moon to perfectly cover the sun, allowing the humans on earth to view the corona of the sun directly only during this time of the total eclipse.

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