It will be the first total eclipse visible from Dunedin since December 27, 1163.
What strikes me is not just the rarity, but the utter lack of fuss last time around.
The only audience? Moa, perhaps. A Haast’s eagle, mid-flight, suddenly wondering if it had misread the day. Not a single human to say ‘‘well, that was something’’.
Humans, of course, wouldn’t arrive here for another century or so. Time itself — at least in the tidy, scheduled sense we now obsess over — didn’t formally arrive in New Zealand until the 19th century, with railways and the need for everyone to agree what ‘‘3pm’’ actually meant. The 1163 eclipse began, in our modern reckoning, at 7.14pm. But to a moa, I suspect, it simply began when the light went out.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, things were busy. Henry II sat on the English throne. The foundation stone of Notre Dame in Paris was being laid. Civilisation was advancing, cathedrals rising — all entirely unaware that, on the far side of the globe, the sky had briefly slipped into night over an empty land.
There’s a philosophical itch here. If no-one saw it, did it matter? A kind of astronomical version of the tree falling in the forest.
And yet — we know it happened. The same mathematics that lets us reconstruct that forgotten evening also tells us, with quiet certainty, that another shadow is coming.
So, on July 22, 2028, at about 4pm, I plan to be somewhere between Portobello and Middlemarch, looking west. This time, there will be people. There will be excitement.
There may even be committees nearby.
For 865 years, the sky has kept this appointment. It would be a shame not to show up.
