Duane Hamacher, an expert on Aboriginal astronomy at the University of NSW, said eclipses were of great importance in indigenous legends. The moon and sun are often seen as a man and a woman who chase each other across the sky, sometimes fighting, sometimes loving.
"In Euahlayi culture, the sun woman, Yhi, is constantly pursuing the moon man, Bahloo, who has rejected her advances," Mr Humacher writes in his blog.
"Sometimes Yhi eclipsed Bahloo, trying to kill him in a jealous rage. However, the spirits that held up the sky intervened and drove Yhi away from Bahloo.
"The Yolngu people of Elcho Island in Arnhem Land provided a similar, but less malevolent, explanation for a solar eclipse -- it was an act of copulation between the sun woman and moon man."
As in other parts of the world, eclipses in Aboriginal communities were seen as a sign of impending calamity or black magic, a threat that could be addressed by medicine men, or wirreenuns, who chanted a particular set of words or threw sacred stones or a boomerang at the eclipsing sun.
Mathematicians say total solar eclipses happen because of a remarkable celestial coincidence.
The sun is 400 times wider than the moon, but it is also 400 times farther away, so for those directly beneath, the discs appear to match in size.
Yesterday, a few lucky people got to witness, in person, what is one of the most spectacular of all celestial phenomenon: a total solar eclipse. Unfortunately, the path of totality took the eclipse, for most of its duration, through the Pacific Ocean, where almost no one lives. Fortunately, the eclipse was visible from the Northernmost point of Australia, which meant that some people, but not many, got to see it.
However, with the eclipse being such a rare event, it was only to be expected that cameras were trained on our nearest star, thus bringing the eclipse to the entire world via technology..
Of all the online photo galleries documenting the eclipse, perhaps the best of them all is that on Spaceweather.
Want more pictures? Well, they're all over the web with some of the largest galleries listed below:
Space.com
Universe Today
Images @ Melonpopzdropz Flickr
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