I heard this story, where they celebrated the birthday of the now defunct North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung in the 1970s and as a birthday present they created through some very complex artillery maneuvers an artificial total solar eclipse over Pyongyang. At that very moment, the dictator stepped out of his palace, in front of the crowd in a suit covered with reflecting material and had giant reflectors directed at him, so he practically 'outshone' the sun… While this seems plausible in view of the megalomania and extreme personality cult we all know about, I still wonder whether that is technically feasible. (I'm not looking for an answer whether the story is true or not.)
So my question is whether there is any possibility to have an artificial, man-made total solar eclipse and if so, how?
Best Answer
It would be very hard to reduce the sense of daylight at the Earths surface as light reaching any point could have been scattered bby the atmosphere over a large angle. This rules out just covering the couple of square degrees the sun extends over.
Solar eclipses get much darker because the light is blocked before it reaches our atmosphere and can not be scattered over a large angle. Even on a cloudy day look up and see how uniform the illumination appears practically from horizon to horizon...