Looking for words

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his first Duino Elegy: ‘beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.’

View from the Moon

Here's what the eclipse looked like from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. It was taken just as totality was beginning in Columbia, SC.

Arthur C. Clarke's eloquent descriptions of his third, then first

The writer Arthur C. Clarke describes a solar eclipse he witnessed in India in 1980.

In 1998 he published a collection of essays called Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! In one of the contained essays, he describes his first of three total eclipses he'd seen up to that point. Here is that essay:

Eclipses come and go, but not really that often. So when rare opportunities arise to get good looks, they should be jumped at. Following are some interesting highlights in the pursuit of this sport.

I count myself extremely fortunate in having seen three total solar eclipses under perfect conditions – first from the air, then at sea, then on land.

The last occasion (India, 1980) provided a dramatic opening for the television series Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious Universe. And in 1973 I sailed from Miami, together with astronauts Wally Schirra and Rusty Schweickart and Starlog’s founder-editor, Kerry O’Quinn, to view a Caribbean eclipse from the deck of SS Cunard Adventurer. It was a tricky business, finding a cloudless site in the narrow band of totality, and I remarked at the time that we would have a chance of filming the first keel-hauling in two hundred years, if the ship’s navigator let us down. Luckily, he didn’t.

Nor did the American Airlines pilot – though he had a somewhat easier job, being able to climb above the weather.

My grandstand view of the 1954 eclipse was by courtesy of the Hayden Planetarium and American Airlines. At considerable expense, American Airlines had taken its only DC-4 out of service and modified it – by ripping out the seats near the escape hatches and turning one of the toilets into a darkroom – to serve as an eclipse special. There were about forty of us aboard, mostly astronomers and photographers from the planetarium, and a good collection of press representatives. One of these had an enormous camera with a forty-eight inch focus lens, mounted like a cannon, and on the average there must have been two cameras per person on the plane. I was using a Bell & Howell 16-mm camera with a turret head, and two Leicas (5-cm Summar and 9-cm Elmar), all loaded with Kodachrome. I had intended to employ my third Leica, but it was suffering from indigestion, having swallowed a dose of seawater while I was taking close-ups of barracuda twenty feet below the Gulf of Mexico. You will see that my photographic experience on my last American visit was somewhat varied….

We took off around midnight from New York and landed in Ottawa, in the small hours, to refuel. Our plan was to orbit just outside the band of totality during the earlier phases of the eclipse, and then to fly across it at right angles during totality. In this way, all the windows on the starboard side of the plane would be facing the eclipse, and with the Sun at an elevation of about fifteen degrees, we should have a perfect view.

Our rendezvous was over the extreme southern tip of Hudson Bay, and when we left Ottawa, we were somewhat depressed by the weather forecast. A front had parked itself exactly along the track of the eclipse! However, we pressed on hopefully and managed to get clear of the clouds at around 10,000 feet. There were occasional cloud peaks towering to 15,000 feet or so, but luckily we had left these behind and so we were able to have a completely unbroken view of the whole eclipse.

We leveled out at 13,500 feet and opened all the emergency hatches on the starboard side, after having first wrapped ourselves up like Eskimos. To my surprise, it did not feel at all cold, though it was rather noisy and drafty. The press photographer with his six-foot-long cannon had been lashed to the nearest stanchion to prevent being blown starboard, but this precaution was really unnecessary.

My main plan had been to take movie shots of the Moon’s shadow moving across the Earth, but I had forgotten that what actually happens in an eclipse is that it just gets darker and darker and there is no clear-cut line of shadow. So this plan failed completely, and I concentrated on the still cameras. The shots of the partial phase were all taken with exposures of 1/100 second at f/8, through a Kodak 4.0 neutral filter. Unfortunately, the recommended exposure of ½ second at f/2.8 for totality ruled out the chance of getting steady views of the climax of the eclipse – though as it turned out, I could have managed with a much shorter exposure.

I was also particularly interested in the changing light and color values on the cloudscape below us. As the eclipse progressed, the clouds seemed to become more and more solid, and the hollows filled with fascinating shadows so that they looked like black lakes.

I missed the onset of totality, as I was observing the port side of the plane, trying to see if I could detect the passage of the Moon’s shadow. I could see nothing of the sort and had quite a job groping my way across the suddenly darkened interior of the plane to my window.

This was the first total eclipse I had seen, and I was surprised at the brilliance of the ring and the absence of the corona streamers that are such a feature of most eclipse photographs. The sky was not black, but a very deep blue, and I saw no stars; nor as far as I know, did anyone else on the plane. There was a considerable glow on the horizon, presumably from the clouds outside the band of totality.

I shot off a few frames, more in hope than in expectation, and then settled down to enjoy the spectacle – which seemed to be over all too soon. When the Sun flashed out again, we all felt like excited schoolboys because everything had worked out so perfectly. In particular we felt very grateful to our navigator, who had carried out a tricky job without sight of the ground, in an area where there were few radio aids, and where the magnetic compass was not too reliable.

What worked - Traffic

There was plenty of panicked press before the eclipse warning of terrible traffic jams. We were urged to arrive early and leave late. We were told that last-minute weather updates would cause eclipse chasers to hit the roads in an urgent rush. We were warned about out-of-towers driving around lost and confused.

These things really didn't happen.

Everything was civilized and orderly.

That said, here's a traffic congestion map of the United States on the day of the eclipse:

You can clearly see that there is increased congestion on the eclipse route, but there were no reports of any of the above problems.

A note on Stendhal Syndrome

Read about the condition here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal_syndrome

Judy Berlin - A movie about an eclipse that keeps on going

Here's the trailer:

With a Edie Falco and Madeline Kahn

Eclipse Friends - Judith's photo

I came to this eclipse, in some ways, overprepared. But I did bring lots of extra glasses and lens covers to share with other people. It turned out to be a good idea. More on that later, but as a result of that overpreparedness, Judith sent me this photo that she captured of partality:

Well done!