I was just rereading Nightfall, the novel-length expansion of a 1941 Asimov short story. I liked the book moderately well when I first read it, but on this reading, the story failed to distract me enough to suspend disbelief and two points started bothering me. First of all, they ignore all possible positions other than to completely disbelieve that darkness could fall, except that the scientists and university people believe the evidence and the religious people believe the religious explanation. This isn’t completely improbable, but realistically speaking it’s likely that reactions would have been much more mixed. The journalist said to be mocking the idea of darkness is unlikely to have worldwide influence (two different regions of the planet are specifically mentioned; he works for a newspaper in the main city of one of them) so what ever happened to the other part of the world, and why wasn’t the reaction more mixed? This isn’t really developed well at all.

Second and more important, can stars really come out all at once when totality is reached? Well, I thought this was improbable, but the Effects During a Solar Eclipse page says otherwise. However, that raises another question. The eclipse in the novel is supposed to have created 9-14 hours of darkness, but totality on Earth can only last 7 minutes. So it seems like either we can have very rapid progress to totality, and thus very sudden darkness and very sudden appearance of stars (as on Earth) or else it would be a much more gradual event, and could last as long as the 9 hours cited, but the progress to and from totality would be much more gradual (since during an eclipse the light changes are caused by the shadow moving over the planet at a constant velocity dependent on the distances involved), so the stars wouldn’t suddenly appear or disappear but it would be more like a standard sunset. I could be wrong about that; I’m not great at astronomy. If I’m not, though, the actual event described is astronomically odd. And even if I am, it distracted me enough to mentally jar me out of the story multiple times, which is annoying.

I also find it hard to believe that with the smallest sun creating a dusk-like atmosphere in its normal state (described before the eclipse) that some stars wouldn’t also show then. Our stars begin to appear long before we reach complete darkness, and we don’t have as many stars as this planet would (it’s supposedly in a region of a galaxy much denser with stars). The description of the light at the point just before the eclipse is extremely dark and ominous, and doesn’t seem strong enough to eliminate light from the stars.