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whirligig-girl · 16 days

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2379 March 19th

The air had a distinct chill to it by now, and Guz looked all around her as the sky took on an almost silvery cast. Gaps in the trees at the edge of the clearing acted as pinhole cameras, producing hundreds of little bright crescents onto the ground and onto the shuttlepod.

"I told you we'd be in the path of totality," Marta said, nudging Guz on the arm and pointing up at the sky. She tapped a button on her clear glass visor, and it suddenly became reflective and metallic. "Look at that. Any minute now." The Sun was now just a slim crescent, the Moon covering nearly all of it.

“Augh…” Guz said, rubbing her arms, “sorry I questioned your navigation skills.”

“Good,” Marta said.

"We have precisely three minutes and twelve seconds, by my count," Dyani said.

Guz had her telescope, a 5" catadioptric astrograph, set up on an equatorial mount, with a tunable Herschellian Wedge serving as a solar filter and heat rejection system. She was used to handholding her telescope, but with only three minutes of totality, she didn't want to take any chances. The holographic eyepiece she'd been using had dutifully captured full spectrum imagery of Sol and before the partial eclipse began she had tuned through the different visible wavelengths in the passthrough lens, allowing her, Marta, and Dyani to see prominences and filaments in Sol’s chromosphere, as well as detailed sunspots in its photosphere. Marta, having evolved around this especially hot star, could even make out the magnetically active plages in the deep-violet Calcium-K line, but Guz's eye lenses had a slight green-yellow tint which blocked far-violet, and Dyani's Vulcan eyes could barely even see blue--though she reported detail in the deep-red Hydrogen-Alpha view which astounded Marta and Guz. No matter--once the eclipse was over Guz would be able to process all of the spectral bands and find more appropriate wavelengths to display them in.

Guz was anxious, and she paced back and forth, shaking her wrists. They made an almost cartoonish literal slapping and sticking sound and she went, which was nice, because it was both tactile and auditory. She went back to the telescope, but she tripped on the tripod.

Guz emitted a gargling warbling sound which Marta was pretty sure was a mellanoid curse word, and she scrambled to fix the telescope’s alignment.

“AUGH!” she said “I messed up the polar alignment! It won’t track now…”

Marta stood up from her chair, and grabbed her canes. She walked up to Guz and put an arm on her shoulder. “Hey, Eaurp, don’t worry. The important thing isn’t the holos.”

“Actually the holos are incredibly important! I know you and Dyani are just here for fun, but I’m doing this for my Astro-251 class. I have to get these images!”

“Eaurp,” Dyani said. “It is unnecessary to fret. Professor Frederick made it clear that terrans have a long history of ‘eclipse madness’--”

“But I’m not a terran!”

“It is not a matter of the species, so much as the circumstance. As you are always so quick to remind us, Earth is the only known inhabited planet with a natural satellite that appears the same size as its parent star. The eclipses are rare and last only minutes,” Dyani said.

“Yeah girlie, you got the eclipse madness,” Marta said, “Just calm down for a minute. You’ll find a way to make up your project.”

Guz put her face in her hands, then looked up and began fiddling with her PADD to try and fix the alignment.

Guz tapped her combadge. "Cadet Guz's log, stardate 56212, continued. Terrans call it March 19th 2379. Local time is… 12:32. We are here in the Italian countryside, a minute away from totality, and I just bumped my telescope off of Sol. I have missed all three total eclipses that have occurred on Earth during my time here. This is my last year, and so my last shot. Everything has to go just right.”

“Forty seven seconds,” Dyani reported. Guz checked her chronometer. Dyani’s mental timing was ‘only’ two seconds off.

“Stop fiddling with that thing and just relax!” Marta said.

“NO! I HAVE TO SEE THE CORONA UP CLOSE!” Guz shouted, and she buried her eye into the holograph’s pass-through. “Ok! I see Sol and Luna!” Guz said. “This alignment will have to do…”

Guz watched as the last slivers of white sunlight disappeared. She looked up, and during that last moment, the entire world changed around her. She was standing in twilight, but with the sky orange all around her. She looked around. The animals were reacting wildly, with twitters and chirps and ribbiting from the local fauna, likely confused as to why the Sun went out in the middle of the day.

When Guz had first set foot on Earth, it was very literally an alien planet. But it still had blue skies, white clouds, deep blue seas, and green foliage (albeit much dryer and less sticky than she had been accustomed to).

The planet Guz was standing on right now was not Mellanus, not Italian Earth, and certainly not Luna--it was an entirely unique world, one which only existed for minutes at a time. Guz was standing on Planet Eclipse.

Guz looked up and shouted. “Hah! LOOK! LOOK AT THAT! THE CORONA!”

Nothing could have prepared her for it. The corona was a silvery halo that extended from the apparent black hole in the sky in all directions, with concentrated hairlike filaments stringing out from reddish pink spots on the black circle’s limb.

Before the eclipse, Sol had been white with a few dark specks and surrounded by darkness, but this thing was nearly its inverse: black, with a few tiny starlike dots inside of it, surrounded by a pale ghostly light. The Sun had disappeared, and something completely alien took its place. Intellectually, Guz knew that all stars--even Zwo-nmu--had coronae, but this was the first time she’d seen the corona with her own two eyes. She supposed it wouldn’t have to be the last--maybe next time she was in space she’d try to blot out the sun with her finger.

Guz could make out four starlike points, one to the left of the Sun, and three to the right. “Look! Look! There’s the other planets! The bright ones are Jupiter and Venus!”

She looked down and around again to see Marta sitting in the grass just staring up at the thing, her visor completely transparent. Dyani had taken her visor off entirely and stared, silently.

“WAIT! NO! The uh! The filter!” Guz said. She hadn’t remembered to remove the filter from her telescope. She scrambled back to the telescope, and twisted a dial on the Herschellian Wedge. The view through the passthrough eyepiece brightened up by 100,000 times and Guz actually saw the corona, magnified 50 times, in unfiltered, uncompressed detail. The detail was so delicate and intricate. Guz could now see the row of cilia-like prominences to the left, which Dyani had seen so easily before but which she and Marta had been unable to detect. In true color, Sol’s chromosphere was magenta, not the spectral red she had seen before in the H-alpha. As Guz’s eyes adjusted, she could even make out Luna’s city lights. She recognized Tycho City, and New Berlin immediately.

“Dyani, how much time do we have left?” Guz said.

After a moment, Dyani replied. “We should have another two minutes of totality left.”

Guz looked away from the eyepiece to get another look at the gaping hole in the sky where the Sun should be.

And then, in an instant, the corona disappeared entirely. A bead of intense white light bore into Guz’s retina, and she immediately flipped her visor down.

Guz’s hands shook. Then she slowly began to smile. “THAT WAS THE COOLEST THING I HAVE SEEN IN MY LIFE!” she shouted, and she began to jump up and down. Her hair went jiggly. Dyani looked at her with a blank stare, and Guz felt a little shy and stopped her celebrations. “I just can’t believe Mellanoids were robbed of this.”

“It is a remarkable celestial coincidence. The diurnal stellar eclipses visible on the T’khut-facing hemisphere of Vulcan do not capture the character of 40 Eridani A’s corona so completely, nor do they produce an atmosphere of such… eerie character.”

“Marta! Marta! Was it different to a Solar Eclipse on Luna?” Guz said, turning around.

Marta was still on the floor, rubbing her eyes, sobbing quietly to herself.

“Marta?” Guz said.

Marta reached out for a hand. Guz gave her a hand and pulled her up. Marta sniffled.

“Are you okay?” Guz said.

Marta just nodded. She didn’t look ok. Guz looked at Dyani, who just shrugged. Marta wiped her eyes again. Guz picked up Marta’s canes, and she walked back to her chair to take a seat.

Guz returned to her telescope. The herschel wedge had not been re-enabled. The holographic eyepiece was fried.

Guz stuttered a little. “Oh. Uh. Dyani. Um. There weren’t two minutes left.”

“What.”

“It was probably more like. Um. Two seconds. So the uh. The holograph is ruined.”

“Damn,” Dyani said.

“Haha. Yeah. Um. That coulda been my eye, haha…”

“Then it is fortunate you were not looking through the eyepiece at the end of totality.”

Guz checked her PADD to make sure the data was streamed properly to her recorder. When she was convinced that it was, she turned off the telescope and began packing it back up into the Class 2 Shuttlepod. By the time she finished, the sky had grown brighter; the air warmer.

When she was done, she sat down on the grass next to Marta’s chair, and put her visor back on. Luna no longer covered so much of Sol.

“It was… I don’t even know how to describe it…” Marta said. “I mean I’ve… I’ve seen solar eclipses before. And they’re beautiful from Luna, don’t get me wrong. But it’s all so different when you’re on Earth.”

“It’s a shame I won’t ever have the chance to see a solar eclipse on the Moon,” Guz said. “Well, I mean, I have seen one, it’s just, when you’re on Earth, we call it a Lunar Eclipse.”

“I’ve even seen terran eclipses before,” Marta said. “They don’t look like anything special from all the way up there. Just a little dark spot going across Earth. When I was younger, I wondered what terrans were so hyped up about, you know? But I get it.”

“And! And!” Guz said. “IT’S SO COOL! THAT YOU GET TO SEE ECLIPSES HAPPEN AT ALL ON LUNA AND VULCAN!”

“Indeed,” Dyani said, “the air temperature does drop noticeably during stellar eclipses due to the reduction in insolation. It is cool shit.”

“Omen doesn’t do that! When Omen got close to Mellanus, it was a lot like Luna--but a lot brighter. But it never goes in front of Zwo-nmu!”

“Why?” Marta said.

“It is a simple consequence of Mellanus’ coorbital trajectory,” Dyani said.

“Closest thing we get to eclipses is when Cold Ember transits Zwo-nmu and if you have really good vision you can see it with just a dark visor as a little dot.”

“I remember going out in my EV suit after finishing an early morning delivery in Oceanus Procellarum one time when I was 13,” Marta said. “The Sun hadn’t risen, but off to the east I could see this faint gray glow. I turned off my suit lights and just stared at the glow, with everything else almost black, just lit a little by the crescent Earth. The milky way was out, but this gray glow was even brighter than it. I kept watching it, even as my suit began to get freezing cold, I sat down on a little boulder a few meters from my shuttle. As I waited; it must have been almost an hour, I saw just about a quarter of a silvery circular halo. I saw a tiny hint of magenta come over the mountain in the distance, and before I knew it, the world exploded into light as the Sun came up. I had the ghost image in my eye for an hour after that. Made getting home a little harder.”

“Wow,” Guz said.

“In principle, what we have just witnessed was a sunset and a sunrise on Luna, just much farther away,” Dyani said.

“A couple years later I saw my first solar eclipse--what Terrans call a Lunar eclipse--and I realized what that ghostly glow was. But even then, I couldn’t see the corona all at once. Earth blocked half of it at a time,” Marta said. “But still I figured that the whole landscape around you turning orange-red from all of Earth’s sunrises and sunsets shining on the Moon more than made up for seeing the corona all at once.”

“Does it?” Dyani asked.

“It’s different when you’re standing out in the open without a space suit. You’re not in this temperature-controlled little box. It all feels… so much more real. The Sun shining right on my face, the air gets real chilly…”

“Is that why you were having an emotional reaction?” Dyani said.

“What? No. Not quite,” Marta said. “I dunno. Maybe. But I just realized, during totality, that that wasn’t just a big bite taken out of the Sun. That’s my home up there. I’ve seen it from space hundreds of times. But never like that.”

“Yeah…” Guz said.

“The Nevasan eclipses visible on Vulcan are similar to a Solar eclipse as viewed from Luna,” Dyani said. “Except the partial phase lasts minutes and the total phase lasts over an hour. It is essentially a brief second night time. 40 Eridani A’s corona is not visible for much of the eclipse.”

“My only other chance to see any eclipses was when I was doing survival training on Andoria, but they had us on Andoria’s far side and the one solar eclipse we would have seen due to an occultation by an outer moon, we were stuck inside the ice caves. Apparently Andorians don’t consider solar eclipses worth interrupting work for. Plus, 40 Eridani B is a white dwarf, so it’s not like its corona is actually visible. Also--you know how our shadows got weirdly sharp in the last minutes before totality? It’s like that all the time on Andoria. So at least there’s that.”

Guz looked down at the ground, then back up at the slowly brightening crescent Sun, and then at the dirt below her feet. The leaves of the trees still projected crescent-shaped images on the ground. Guz held her hair out, and bubbled it up, wondering if the green-tinted caustics cast on the ground would behave similarly.

“It was certainly one hell of an expedition to close out our senior years,” Dyani said.

“There she goes with the colorful language again,” Marta muttered.

“Perhaps you should speak up so Eaurp can hear you,” Dyani said.

They were arguing again. Guz didn’t think Dyani liked her very much, but she definitely didn’t seem to get along with Marta. “Thanks for coming out to Italy with me for this,” Guz said.

“Yeah,” Marta said. “It was… an adventure.”

“The Italian peninsula is home to many interesting historical sites. Perhaps we should visit some of them,” Dyani said. “For example, the fallen tower of Pisa.”

“Touristy nonsense, it’s just a field full of a bunch of people pretending to try to lift it back upright,” Marta said.

“I wanted to see it. Anyway we should probably start with finding any town, since our shuttlepod isn’t flying any time soon,” Guz said.

Marta gave Dyani some side-eye.

“That was not my fault,” Dyani said.

--------------

And yes, there really will be a total solar eclipse visible in Afroeurasia on March 19th, 2379 (at about 12:30 in Italy.)

Marta Martinez and Dyani were two of Guz's classmates at Starfleet Academy. In fact, Dyani was Guz's roommate. Dyani is @raydrawsdaly's OC. Marta and Guz are my OCs.

#Future Eclipse #Solar Eclipse #long post #fic #fanfic #Star Trek #Eaurp Guz #Dyani #Marta Martinez #Original Character #Original Characters #Starfleet Academy #Eclipse #Science Fiction #Slimegirl

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