I experienced the primeval chill of an almost complete solar eclipse in the US on a summer's day in the mid-1990s. As it got under way, everything in nature seemed to go still.
The sun continued to shine but it was as if a 200 watt light bulb had been replaced by a 40 watt bulb. As the moon moved across four-fifths of the sun's surface, the shadows under the maple trees became pitch black and it suddenly became quite cool.
In the garden the finches and cardinal birds stopped singing and flying around, fooled into thinking night was falling. America, where most of the population believes in a god, treated the occurrence with typical scientific detachment.
In communist China, such stellar phenomena are still often taken as portents of heavenly interference in worldly affairs. Solar eclipses have traditionally augured bad news in China, and earthquakes, floods and comets are thought to herald major political upheavals.
The death of Chairman Mao Zedong in September 1976 was preceded two months earlier by a huge earthquake in Tangshan which killed some 270,000 people.
On March 9th, 1997, a month after Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, passed away, parts of northern China experienced a total eclipse as well as a rare sighting of the Hale-Bopp comet.
Some geomancers, employing the artful technique of hindsight, later interpreted this confluence of events not as marking the exit of the communist leader but as a portent of doom for Asia's tiger economies, which began their collapse shortly thereafter.
In China, where tradition has it that an eclipse is caused by a hungry dog feasting on the sun and that people must beat drums to make the sun come back, astronomy is closely related to philosophy and religion.
"Ancient Chinese people believed that what happened in the heaven was closely connected with what happened on the earth, and when important things happened, they always observed the sky and made astronomical records," said a Chinese history-astronomer.
This has provided invaluable data for modern stargazers, according to F. Richard Stephenson, a University of Durham professor and author of Historical Eclipses and Earth's Rotation (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Early observations of eclipses, comets, sunspots, auroras and meteor showers have proved of considerable value in tracing long-term trends, he said, especially during the period from 722 BC to 481 BC when many astronomical records were preserved in a chronicle known as the Chunqiu, or Spring and Autumn Annals.
The Chunqiu, which contained observations of 36 precisely dated solar eclipses, was largely concerned with the small state of Lu, the home of the great Chinese philosopher Confucius (551 BC479 BC) and it provides the oldest surviving series of solar-eclipse records from any civilisation.
Modern calculations showing that a partial solar eclipse occurred in Confucius's home town on August 20th, 552 BC, enabled Chinese scientists to calculate his birth date - a matter for much historical debate - at October 9th that year.
"Almost one million days have elapsed since the earliest total solar eclipse recorded in China [709 BC]," noted Prof Stephenson. "On average, each of these was about 0.021 second shorter than our present day. That makes today's accumulated clock error almost seven hours."
The solar eclipse of July 17th, 709 BC, in China was the earliest to be described as "total" from any part of the world. During another total eclipse on June 25th, 1275, Chinese annals record that "the sky and Earth were in darkness; people could not be distinguished within a foot; chickens and ducks returned to roost."
In an account of the solar eclipse of January 21st, 1292, the sun was said to have "a golden ring", a rare pre-telescope description of the outer edge of the photosphere which is not obscured by the moon. From the time China was first unified in 221 BC until the last imperial dynasty ended in 1912, official astronomers kept a nightly watch of the sky to advance the sciences of astronomy and astrology, in particular to identify any omens which might decide the fate of the prevailing dynasty.
When a total eclipse plunged the then capital, Xian, into darkness in 181 BC, the Empress of Gaozi is recorded as saying: "This is on my account." Next year she duly died. China's current rulers are undoubtedly quite relieved that Wednesday's solar eclipse will miss the Middle Kingdom; they would not want the citizens getting the notion that the end of the communist dynasty was nigh due to a plethora of celestial spectacles.
"Nothing abnormal is happening to the universe," said Li Qibin, director of the Beijing Astronomical Observatory at the time of the 1997 eclipse. "These happenings never stop."