What are the odds! In a total solar eclise, the moon fits over the sun. Not just fits over the sun, fits perfectly over the sun.
As in, uncannily perfectly. It's too perfect. As in, it's a small, a very small moon, and very large sun, and it just so happens that the moon is just the right distance from the earth and the sun to fit perfectly.
Here is an extract from the wikipedia entry on solar eclipse:
Solar eclipses are an extreme rarity within the universe at large. They are seen on Earth because of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. Even on Earth, eclipses of the type familiar to people today are a temporary (on a geological time scale) phenomenon. Many millions of years in the past, the Moon was too close to the Earth to precisely occlude the Sun as it does during eclipses today; and many millions of years in the future, it will be too far away to do so.
I love the understatement of it... fortuitously. I mean yes, it is pure chance, but the sheer odds against it dwarf my struggling mind. Still, I guess we have life on earth so stranger things have happened.
If you go to the NASA website you can see that the next total solar eclipse is in November 2012.
A full solar eclipse is only viewable from a pretty small path on Earth, see the map on that linked website. Who is up for Cairns in 2012?
I have never before appreciated quite what a mind fuck this is, the way that it fits over at exactly the right size.
They've run this Universe experiment 50,000,000,000,000 times and this is the only one in which this happened...