By Michael V. Cusenza
For a brief period on Monday afternoon, the city that never sleeps, the greatest and busiest metropolis in the world, stopped to appreciate the first total solar eclipse visible in the continental United States in 38 years.
“Amazing to see something cosmic bring so many New Yorkers together,” tweeted Police Commissioner Jim O’Neill. “For just a few minutes, nothing else mattered.”
According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the celestial event is a solar eclipse in which the moon passes between the sun and Earth and blocks all or part of the sun for up to about three hours, from beginning to end, as viewed from a given location. For this eclipse, the longest period when the moon completely blocks the sun from any given location along the path was about 2 minutes and 40 seconds. NASA noted that everyone in North America and parts of South America, Africa, and Europe witnessed at least a partial solar eclipse, where the moon covered part of the sun’s disk.
“The divided United States of America will unite today, sharing a cosmic event predicted by the methods and tools of science,” astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson posted on Twitter early Monday morning.
Photos Courtesy of NYPD and NASA
