because it's mapped the convention of scrolling down on a web page and mapped the path of the eclipse onto that and because you don't always need north to point up just like you don't always need a compass rose or a scale bar.
the minimap is oriented differently (north is up) whereas the main map view is not; that just contributes to the spatially confusing presentation in my opninion. maybe a rectangle of the full map fov along the minimap path rather than a circle would help mitigate this, I don't know... it's also following the path of the eclipse backwards, which is also distracting.