On Tuesday morning the sun rose over Oeno Island, a normally uninhabited coral atoll in the South Pacific, as a black hole in the sky, feathered with pale whiskers of light.

And so began, once again, one of the great spectacles available to the inhabitants of the Earth. The great cosmic rinse cycle of death and rebirth. The dying and return of the light against an ethereal wallpaper of the stars. A total solar eclipse.

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Every two years or so, in their ceaseless rhythmic dances through the sky, the sun, moon and Earth line up like cosmic billiard balls. Somewhere along a narrow arc of Earth — this time in Chile and Argentina — the shadow of the moon sweeps across the world, the day dies, colors melt and dissolve the landscape, the stars step out of sudden twilight, animals go to sleep and wake up, the temperature drops, the wind blows. The whole shadow, moving at a thousand miles an hour, is ringed by a wall of rainbow.

Anchored by a circle of black absentness, ghostly streamers of light from the sun known as the corona spread out, pinned to the sky like a butterfly on a lepidopterist’s board.