Solar Eclipse

They scheduled a total solar eclipse for today, but they decided to hold it in some other part of the world. I was so far out of the loop that I didn't know about it until it was too late to hop a plane for Istanbul. They've got another one scheduled for 2008, but so far the mainstream media is conspiring to keep me out of the loop yet again, because they're not telling where the next one will be. But I'm not pouting.

MSNBC has a great story about the eclipse. Be sure to look at the slide show, because the photography is phenomenal.

In 1979, I saw my first--and so far only--total eclipse. We were living in Spokane, Washington, at the time, and the narrow swath of totality didn't quite reach us there. So my husband and I took the day off work and drove down to the Tri-City area near the Oregon border to see the eclipse. Unfortunately, the cloud cover was nearly solid. We drove around, hunting for a break in the clouds, and with about a half hour to go before it started, we found some blue sky over a park, so we stopped there.

One other man was there, and he had prepared ahead, with a 3-foot wooden box that was open on one long side so you could look inside. He had a white piece of paper inside on one of the small ends and a small hole in the wood on the other end, so the outline of the sun showed up on the paper. He also had a pair of binoculars, but we couldn't use them until totality.

We alternated between watching the sun become a smaller and smaller crescent on the paper and observing the darkening of the world around us. It was bright but dim at the same time--not like a cloudy day, though, because our shadows lost their contrast with the unshadowed ground but still kept the sharp edge. I can understand why eclipses stirred fear and superstition in ancient people.

When the sun had shrunk to a tiny sliver, I looked around at the park, a wide, grassy valley with high hills on either side. Scientists talk about solar eclipses being caused by the moon's shadow falling on the earth, but it never sank in that it was a shadow. All of a sudden, a wide, sharp, black edge of shadow swept down the hillside and across the valley in a whoosh that engulfed us in darkness and took my breath away. I had no idea the earth spins so fast.

We took turns looking at the sun's corona through the binoculars, and when it was my turn, the edge of the blackened sun gave off a solitary spark of light that spread into a lighted rim, and I put the binoculars down. We watched the sun's crescent grow again on the piece of paper for a while, then we packed up and went home.

It was one of those spectacular experiences that I'll never forget--like watching the aurora borealis on the way home from a speech tournament in high school, or getting ashed-in by Mt. St. Helens. I don't want it to be my only total eclipse.

I bet my friend the astrophysics major can find out where the 2008 eclipse will be, and I can start saving my pennies.