The Strange Sensory Theater of a Total Solar Eclipse

Nothing in an ordinary sunny sky hints that such a large structure is waiting behind the glare. Once the bright surface is covered, pale streamers reach outward from the Moon, some smooth and featherlike, others shaped by enormous loops in the Sun’s magnetic field. This is the corona, an outer atmosphere heated to temperatures of more than a million degrees despite lying far beyond the comparatively cooler visible surface. Its form is not the same at every eclipse. Near solar maximum, when magnetic activity is high, the corona tends to spread more evenly around the Sun.