This exclusivity is down to the path of the Moon's shadow, which is only about 100 kilometres wide. Well, I checked it out. Birmingham, in the English Midlands. Then I began counting how many total eclipses had been visible from this city. You may need a helping hand to get the best out of this brief experience, and this is where Steel has provided the eclipse aficionado with an excellent overview of the history and astronomy of the phenomenon.
Steel begins by explaining how lucky Earth-dwellers are to see eclipses at all.
The Moon just happens to be both 400 times smaller than the Sun and 400 times closer. Thinking about it idly, you might expect that the Moon's orbit round the Earth would produce a Solar eclipse at each new moon. Babylonian ways Steel describes how the ancient Babylonians first cottoned on to the fact that similar eclipses occurred every 18 years and 10 days, an interval they called a saros. Each eclipse in this series was about 115 degrees of longitude to the west of the previous one. After four saros periods, the geometry almost repeated itself, thus explaining why the previous British eclipse occurred in June 1927.