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“Maintenance downtime of the sun/moon hologram, new firmware upgrade.”

“The sun is very small and much closer to Earth than ‘roundies’ claim it to be.  It's only a few hundred meters wide and about five miles above our disc. The moon is much, much larger and a tiny little bit closer. When the enormous moon passes just beneath the tiny sun it completely obscures its light.”

“Astronomy-inspired apocalyptic conspiracy theories hitch their wagon to whatever is happening in astronomy this year. It's the eclipse now, a few years back it was a planetary alignment, and two decades ago conspiracy theorists were excited by Comet Hale-Bopp." Said astronomer Michael Brown from Monash University in Australia tells ScienceAlert.

“I do wonder if media interest in these stories is about mockery. Even some of the British tabloids frame this story as a conspiracy theory by a numerologist, whereas they sometimes pitch pseudoscience as the work of plucky self-trained experts.” says Brown, noting that since readers enjoy the ridiculousness of these theories, the tabloids rake in the clicks even if they don't actually believe in the content.

“Images and data from potentially as many as millions of people will be collected and analysed by scientists for years to come.” Carrie Black from the US National Science Foundation said last month.

“I doubt there's a clean demarcation between harmless nonsense and dangerous conspiracy theories. Fortunately many astronomy-related conspiracy theories fall into the harmless nonsense category, but there are occasional grim exceptions, like the Heaven's Gate cult.” he tells ScienceAlert.