Before dawn today, six planets strung themselves across the eastern sky: Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, rising in a long arc toward the horizon. Hours later, the moon slid across the sun, and a shadow swept from Greenland to Iceland to northern Russia, reaching Spain by evening, the first total solar eclipse to touch mainland Europe since 1999.
Social media has spent the week calling the alignment the first of its kind in two thousand years. It isn't. A comparable six-planet lineup crossed the sky as recently as January 2025, and parades of five or six naked-eye planets recur every few years; astronomers have spent days debunking the “2,000 years” claim, alongside an unrelated rumour that Earth would briefly lose its gravity.
For over a thousand years, though, no one watching a darkening sun in China would have called it an eclipse. They called it shi: eating. A celestial dragon, it was believed, was devouring the sun, and the only remedy was noise: drums, gongs, cooking pots, anything that could be struck, so the dragon might loosen its jaws and let the light return. Even after Han dynasty astronomers had worked out the true mechanics of eclipses, calculating them to the hour, the drumming never stopped.
