Chasing the Shadow, Part 1
Memoirs of a sometime eclipse watcher: The Dalles, Oregon
I’m being followed by a moonshadow
Moonshadow, moonshadow
Leaping and hopping on a moonshadow
Moonshadow, moonshadow
—Cat Stevens
I ’ve been a stargazer for as long as I can remember. At nine years old I could go outside at night and point out Cassiopeia and Orion, Arcturus and Aldebaran, Mars and Jupiter and Saturn. The Hayden Planetarium on Central Park West was my home away from home. My favorite reading material was my treasured copy of the Golden Nature Guide Stars, by Herbert S. Zim:
In a lifetime of stargazing, I’d seen my share of lunar eclipses and a couple of partial solars, but never a total eclipse of the sun. Compared to solar eclipses, those of the lunar variety are a dime a dozen. That’s because a lunar eclipse occurs when the moon passes behind the earth and crosses through its shadow:
This means the eclipse can be seen from anywhere on the nighttime side of the earth. All you have to do is go outside and look up; as long as the full moon is visible in the sky at all, you can see it darken as it slips into the earth’s shadow.
In a solar eclipse, by contrast, it’s the moon casting its smaller shadow on the larger earth instead of the other way around. To see the eclipse, you have to get yourself to the specific location where the moon’s shadow happens to fall. If you’re not in the right spot on earth, the sun looks the same as on any other ordinary day; you have to be in just the right place to see the moon move across and block it out. If you’re somewhere near the path of totality but not right on it, you’ll see a partial eclipse, with the moon covering part of the sun’s face but not all of it. Those don’t count: the difference between a partial solar eclipse and a total is, as Mark Twain said in another context, the difference between a lightning bug and a lightning bolt.
So even though both kinds of eclipse occur with about the same frequency, the lunar kind can be seen over a much larger area of the planet. This makes them much more common from any given place on earth. Wherever you happen to live, you’re likely to see a lunar eclipse every couple of years, but a solar eclipse only once every 400 years or so.
S o when the opportunity arose back in 1979 to witness a total solar eclipse close to home, I jumped at the chance. I was living in California at the time, working as a staff documentation writer at a large Silicon Valley computer research laboratory. Somebody put a message out on the company e-mail system looking for passengers to help charter a light plane and pilot, to fly up to the Pacific Northwest for the eclipse of February 26, 1979. Nothing was going to keep me off that plane.
My wife was less enthusiastic: “This is really your thing, not mine. Go have fun, save the air fare and let somebody else have my seat who’ll appreciate it more.” It took all my powers of persuasion to get her to tag along. She did eventually acquiesce, but not without a reluctant sigh and shake of the head.
W e left the house on Eclipse Day about 3:00 AM and drove to Buchanan Field in Concord, California, out beyond the East Bay hills, for our flight north. The plane seated seven passengers along with the pilot. Neither of us had ever flown in a light plane before, so that was a new experience in itself. The pilot thought we were all a bunch of lunatics, flying all over the map to see some crazy light show in the sky, but hey, a payday was a payday.
By 7:00 AM, we were on the ground in The Dalles, Oregon, up on the Columbia River and, more to the point, smack on the eclipse totality path. The little airfield was crowded with other planes that had converged to witness the same spectacle we’d come to see. It was probably the most traffic the place had ever seen in a single day, before or since.
Since The Dalles lay near the beginning of the eclipse path, totality was due early in the morning, shortly after 8:00. As the sun rose, the eastern sky was streaked with clouds. In the early, partial phases of the eclipse, as the moon began to creep slowly across its face, the sun kept ducking in and out of the clouds. Our little group stood around on the airport tarmac, praying that when the eclipse reached totality it would be in one of the open patches of sky and not behind one of those clouds.
Then, about 7:45, the air was suddenly filled with the sound of aircraft engines starting up all over the field. Apparently the mass hive mind had concluded that the best chance to catch the eclipse unobstructed was from up above the clouds. We all looked at one another and piled back into the plane as fast as we could. The last thing we wanted was to be stuck on the runway, grounded by a traffic jam in the air.
Our pilot grabbed his joystick and rode like a cowboy for the nearest patch of open sky. The air was swarmed with other planes like ours, circling for a view of the dwindling sun. (In retrospect, a helicopter with its hovering ability would have served better.) We watched as the visible sliver of sunlight grew smaller and smaller until it shrank into the single glittering jewel of the “diamond ring” effect, and then winked out completely. The final moment of totality brought gasps of wonder from everyone in the plane, including the pilot.
The climactic moment of a solar eclipse is like nothing else you will ever experience. Time freezes into eternity. The hollow ring of the solar corona hangs motionless in the sky like an angelic halo. The sky goes dusky, not full nighttime black but dark enough for the brighter stars and planets to reappear. The moment lasts . . . forever.
And then it’s over. The diamond ring re-emerges on the opposite side, and the moon slowly slips away to reveal the sun’s full face again. The duration of totality varies depending on a number of factors, but it might typically last, say, two or three minutes. They are the longest two minutes of your life, and the shortest.
The flight back home was bathed in endorphin afterglow. Everyone’s face beamed like Charlton Heston’s coming down from Mount Sinai. Even the pilot was visibly moved; maybe these lunatics weren’t so loony after all. Even my loving wife had to admit I was right to talk her into coming along—so you know it must have been a truly extraordinary experience.
Next: Part 2: Konarak, Orissa. For more on eclipses and other related arcana, see my treatise on the motions of the moon:
***************************************************************
“Chasing the Shadow” by Stephen Chernicoff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
