Read and Riot

Embroidered Beaded Ivory Satin Gown

c. 1956

by Jacques Griffe

Bioluminescence series by Rob Rey

12th August 2026

The distance from Earth to our sun happens to be about 400 times greater than the distance from Earth to our moon (though the exact value changes because neither the Earth's orbit nor our moon's orbit are perfectly circular). The diameter of our sun happens to be about 400 times greater than the diameter of our moon. When projecting from real 3D space onto the apparent dome of the sky, both of those 400s cancel out, so our sun's angular diameter ranges from 31.6 to 32.7 arcminutes while our moon's angular diameter ranges from 29.3 to 34.1 arcminutes.

Both of those ratios are changing at astronomic time scales. We think our sun is gradually getting bigger as it ages; we know from ancient geological and fossil evidence that our moon is gradually getting farther away (and thus appears to shrink). Millions of years in the past, total solar eclipses were much more common, as a visually-bigger moon blocked out the smaller sun more often, but also a bit less interesting, as the sun's corona would have been covered up as well. Millions of years in the future, the moon will become too small to completely cover the sun and there will never be another total solar eclipse.