Eclipse Chronicles

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that an eclipse will sweep across the United States on April 8. It’s going to just miss our hometown, so we’re going to drive a couple of hours, have a nice weekend visiting lakes and vineyards, and then set up on Monday to view the cosmic show.

I’ve been to two eclipses in my life. My wife and I took a cruise around Hawaii to see the one that crossed the islands. We were Tri-Valley Stargazers Astronomy Club members at the time, and it seemed that half the club was scattered somewhere across the Big Island that day. We saved up for the cruise since we were celebrating my wife’s recently-earned PhD, which was a fortunate decision. It was a great gathering, with an Apollo astronaut on board, many astronomers both professional and amateur, and a famous weatherman. Not everyone was an eclipse-chaser, though. I remember a honeymooning couple who were upset that the ship was going to skip the usual stop at Maui so that they could take up a position on the eclipse’s center line. A group of us explained to them that they would remember the seven minutes of darkness much longer than a visit to Maui.

In the wee hours of the morning on the day of the eclipse, we felt the ship’s engines kick into high gear. This wasn’t cruising speed — the captain was in a hurry. As we learned later, clouds had moved in. The weatherman had used radar to locate a break in the clouds, and the Captain had headed full steam for clear skies. It paid off. The day dawned on the already partially-eclipsed sun rising from the sea. We set up tripods, put the filters on our cameras and camcorders, and practiced compensating for the rolling of the ship for the next hour. We were rewarded when the shadow of the moon swept across the open ocean at a thousand miles per hour and the sun’s corona stood out like a Hawaiian peal in the sky. A magnificent prominence stood out from the sun’s limb, lighting the sky. The seven minutes seemed to hang forever in the sky and yet it was over in a few instants of time. We brought back some decent pictures (rolling ship, remember?) and some fantastic memories. Our friends on the Island were largely clouded out, except for the Club president, who had the pull to get a spot at the Mauna Kea observatory above the clouds.

The Honeymooners? They were very happy that they missed Maui.

My first eclipse was when I was in high school, and the school astronomy club arranged to get a couple of school vans and counselors to drive to Quebec to see the eclipse. We weren’t as fortunate with the weather on that one. The skies were mostly cloudy with the sun peeking out only occasionally. We hoped they would clear, but it only got thicker as totality approached. The best we could see was the disk of the sun shining redly through some thin spots in the cloud cover, which were too thick to let us see the solar corona. Still, the stillness that came over the land as the moon’s shadow fell was awe-inspiring. The birds fell quiet, and even the mosquitos went away for a few minutes. Even with the clouds, it was an experience.

The clear-sky forecast for Upstate New York on an April day doesn’t offer a lot of assurance for good conditions. Still, we’ll set off next month prepared for the worst and hoping for the best. Even a cloudy eclipse is an experience worth remembering. In the next newsletter, I’ll tell you how it turned out.