Because I've learned much of the Chinese language, I know that the Chinese word for "movie" literally means "electric shadow." I love knowing things like that!
I don't think about shadows much. A solar eclipse is a kind of shadow, and when I was young I remember using a cardboard box with a pin hole on one side to see an eclipsed sunbeam on the other side that looked like a round cookie that's had a single big bite taken out of it. (It's dangerous to view it directly.)
I don't recall ever seeing a lunar eclipse. I've heard that the ancients knew that the earth was spherical because its shadow on the moon in a lunar eclipse is circular at every angle.
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