Inc. All rights reserved. At least, they should have seen it, but the weather was dreadful - totally overcast by clouds, with heavy bursts of rain. This did not dampen the spirits of the 1 million eclipse tourists, who were plunged into darkness, in the middle of the day.
Total eclipses happen, because of the coming together of a number of coincidental events.
I will discuss the use of the word coincidence later, but we'll stick with it for now. The Moon orbits the Earth, once every 28 days. The Earth orbits the Sun once every 365.3 days. It follows that sometimes the Moon must get between the Earth and the Sun, casting a shadow on to the Earth's surface, as shown below. One might expect this to happen about once a month.