With the levels of hype and anticipation rapidly growing for next month’s Eclipse Across America (or whatever people are calling it now), I have been reflecting on when I witnessed a total solar eclipse back in 1970 as a 13-year-old.
I was an 8th grade student at Walt Whitman Intermediate School in the Mt. Vernon area south of Alexandria, Virginia. I was deeply interested in all things space and astronomical. I had received a toy-store 3″ reflector telescope for my birthday in 1968, and I quickly outgrew its capabilities. My parents gave me a 4-1/2″ Tasco reflector telescope for Christmas in 1969.
As a subscriber to Sky and Telescope magazine, I knew full well that the path of a total solar eclipse would be skirting the East Coast of the United States on March 7, 1970. Our home was about 200 miles away from the path of totality. We’d see a very nice partial eclipse with only a thin sliver of the sun remaining, but it just wouldn’t be the same as experiencing totality.
Sometime during the winter, my dad agreed that he would drive me to the small town of Edenton, North Carolina—a town where we lived from 1962 to 1965—which was near the centerline of the eclipse path. Henry Peters, one of my dad’s former coworkers, still lived in a house diagonally across the street from where we had lived. (My 2nd grade teacher lived in our old house now.) We would set up in the Peters’s back yard, where we’d have a clear view of the southern sky during the eclipse.
I was incredibly excited! This was going to be part of a great year for space events, with the Apollo 11 and 12 moon landings in the second half of 1969, and the Apollo 13 landing scheduled for April 1970. There was also going to be a transit of the sun by Mercury in May 1970. To help mitigate my anticipation, I started planning and visualizing what it was going to be like. I even copied the eclipse path from Sky and Telescope onto a road map of North Carolina, imagining myself being so close to the middle of the eclipse.
My dad and I built a projection box to hang off the eyepiece mount on the telescope. This truncated pyramid had a piece of white paper at the wide end, onto which the eyepiece would project an image of the sun. A hole in the top of the box slid over the eyepiece holder, and we supported the box with masking tape attached to the telescope tube. My plan was to photograph the projected image of the sun until we got just about to totality. Then I’d pull off the box and take photos directly through the telescope’s eyepiece tube during totality using a T-adapter on my camera and a 2x Barlow lens. I’d reverse the procedure after the total phase of the eclipse ended.
My telescope camera was my dad’s old 1950s-era Exakta VX, a heavy, manually wound 35 mm film camera with a waist-level ground glass viewfinder. There was no light meter in the camera, so I would have to guess at the exposure settings. Focusing on the viewfinder often required flipping up a secondary magnifier. So it was by no means a point-and-shoot setup like we have today.
The telescope lacked a clock drive. Although it had an equatorial mount, I had no way to align it well to the Earth’s axis in the daytime. I relied on two hand knobs on springy metal extensions (which made the mount shake) to track the sun. Any kind of time exposure would be blurred.
It was cumbersome to say the least. I was still a kid, so my patience and skills at focusing and steadying the camera were not the greatest. The telescope mount was flimsy enough as it was without the weight of the camera and the projection box—neither of which it was designed to carry—hanging off the front end of the scope. But it felt very sophisticated and high-tech to me, and I was proud that my dad trusted me with all this gear.
My dad and I, along with my best friend Paul Wellen, left Alexandria for the drive to Edenton early in the morning of Saturday, March 7. I remember nothing of the drive south, except that we probably left at about 6 a.m. on what would have been a trip of about four to five hours. The eclipse was going to start at 12:15 p.m. Knowing my dad, he would have worked backward from a planned arrival time of 11:15 and allowed time for one or two bathroom breaks and two flat tires along the way.
We arrived at Edenton with plenty of time to spare. It was a glorious early spring day—not a cloud in the sky, little wind, and pleasant shirtsleeve temperature. Paul and I set up our scopes in the Peters’s back yard.
Right on cue at 12:15, we saw the moon’s edge creep in from the southwest and start taking an increasingly large bite out of the solar disk. There were three very prominent sunspot groups on the face of the sun, and we enjoyed watching the moon’s limb approach and then obscure the sunspots. We photographed the sun’s image on the projection box. Since we had to peer in from the side, the sun’s disk is egg-shaped rather than circular in the photos, elongated more or less in the southeast-northwest direction.
The national TV stations had live coverage of the eclipse. I recall popping into the house a few times to see video of the major beach party and of totality as the moon’s shadow passed over Veracruz, Mexico. Soon afterward, the moon’s shadow crossed northern Florida, about 15 minutes before totality was going to start for us. It was exciting to see it on live TV and know that we’d be experiencing it very soon ourselves!
About five minutes before the beginning of totality, it was still daylight, but there was definitely something different about the quality of the sunlight. Weaker, perhaps, or thinner—I can’t find a word for it. The sun still cast shadows, so it wasn’t quite the dimmer light under like the thin haze of a winter day’s sky. The sky looked deeper in color, kind of like you would see high up on a tall mountain. There were still no clouds in sight.
I took the projection box off of the telescope and rotated the tube so that the eyepiece holder would be facing higher up, ready for the camera. We had heard that we might be able to see the shadow of the moon racing toward us from the southwest as totality approached. However, Edenton is in a very flat tidal plain, so we couldn’t see anything coming our way. The remaining crescent of the sun lingered briefly.
And then—totality.
Suddenly there was a sky as dark as that in late twilight, but the horizon was brighter than you’d see just before nightfall. The sky was between deep blue and black. The sun was a black circle surrounded by a small hazy ring of dim fire—the solar corona. My dad photographed the naked-eye scene with his camera, which was loaded with Plus-X film.
It was eerily quiet, I think because most of us were simply awestruck at what we were seeing. There was no traffic anywhere near the very small neighborhood. I don’t recall paying attention to the birds that day even before the eclipse, so I can’t say anything about the commonly-reported phenomenon of birds suddenly roosting or ceasing their calls.
As our eyes became dark-adapted a minute or so into the eclipse, it was easy to see Venus off to the northeast (upper left) of the sun, and it’s clearly visible in the wide-angle photo above. I could also spy Mercury, much dimmer and farther away on the southwest side of the sun. Saturn and Mars were also supposed to be visible that day, much farther to the east. I’m pretty sure I saw them, but I can’t recall with certainty.
This is a merge of the best two photos I got through the telescope of the large solar prominences we could see during the eclipse. (The “figure 8 effect”of the background is just from combining two circular images of the view through the telescope.) The view through the eyepiece was filled with the wispy coronal streamers that were also visible to the naked eye stretching out more than the sun’s diameter away from the disk. Their full extent was too dim to show up on the photos, but closer to the sun the streamers can be seen as irregular bright areas in the photos of the sun above.
I don’t recall actually seeing any movement in the streamers or in the prominences, but this being the first time I had ever observed them directly, I could certainly imagine them to be in motion. I could also pick out mountains on the moon’s limb silhouetted against the corona.
As I was trying to take photos of the prominence on the west side of the sun, Bailey’s Beads suddenly heralded the end of totality as the sun started peeking through the mountains on the moon’s limb. Seconds later, the “diamond ring” appeared, and the telescope was suddenly flooded with light.
Totality lasted two minutes forty-eight seconds from our location. That time went by in a blur. My dad and I each shot precisely twelve photos during that time period.
The moon’s disk retreated from the sun over the course of the next hour. The experience of totality completely overshadowed our experiences in the dénouement of the ensuing events. We reattached the projection box and took photos of the last half of the eclipse the same way we did for the first half. The box was rotated differently from the way we had it set up for pre-totality, so the sun’s image is now elongated along the east-west axis in this set of photos. As the moon’s disk slipped off to the northeast, we watched our “old friends” reappear one by one—the three sunspot groups that were gradually covered during onset of the eclipse.
The eclipse ended at 2:50 p.m. We packed our telescopes back into the car, said our goodbyes, and drove north. Again, I remember nothing about the drive home!
My dad took the rolls of exposed film to the photo lab at his office. He printed several 8×10 photos of the best of the pictures we had taken. I kept the photos for many years. They eventually stuck together, probably from being stored in the hot attic at my mom’s townhouse while I was at college. I threw them out many years ago.
I hadn’t thought about these photos for many years until recently, when I began preparing for the total eclipse this August. I was sure I didn’t have the enlargements any longer. But could I possibly still have the negatives? Imagine my elation when I found them in a box over the weekend!
I enjoyed rediscovering these photos and reconstructing my memories of the eclipse. The details have faded from my memory in the course of the forty-seven ensuing years. However, the feelings of anticipation and then dumbstruck awe are as clear now as they were then.
There are few events in our lives that palpably prove to us our special place in the universe. I think that being in a total solar eclipse is perhaps as close as you can get to experiencing “the overview effect” while your feet are still firmly planted on the ground. I’ll always be grateful that I had the opportunity to participate in that magical experience.
I hope the weather cooperates on August 21. I’ll have better gear to take images of the eclipse and process them afterward. I’ll be setting up somewhere near Greenwood, South Carolina, ready to immerse myself in moonshadow again when the time comes. Even if there’s torrential rain that afternoon, I’ll do my best just to enjoy watching the sky grow dark in midday—and remember again with gratitude that glorious day in March 1970.