It was ten years ago today, August 11, 1999, that I saw my first total solar eclipse. Because the eclipse path passed over a densely populated swath of India, the Middle East, and Europe, it’s likely that it was the most viewed total solar eclipse in the history of the world. For me, part of a team from Williams College — and having just that spring declared a double major in math and astrophysics, visited Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile the previous fall, and the Very Large Array radio interferometer in New Mexico that summer — the eclipse was a transformative experience. I knew I was going to do astronomy for the rest of my life, but the eclipse was the moment when I realized what kind.
We were set up on top of the Hotel Alutus in Râmicu Valcea, Romania, just a few miles from the point of greatest eclipse, where the eclipse would last longer than anywhere else — 2 minutes, 23 seconds. We spent about two weeks essentially building a small observatory with telescopes and spectrometers and computers just to snap a few pictures in the few minutes of totality. I was charged with photography, of both the team in its work setting up, and of the eclipse itself.
Whatever you think about a total eclipse, if you haven’t seen one, it’s wrong. There’s nothing like it in the world, the eerie twilight that builds as the moon’s shadow races across the planet at 1000 miles an hour until it’s right on top of you, the strange silence of a whole town holding its breath and watching, thunderstruck, the way the air cools, the indescribable color — blue and blazing like some otherworldly electric arc around the black moon — of the solar corona.
I can still remember sitting on the roof behind a bank of cameras, tearing off solar filters as the eclipse became total, snapping photos, moving to the next camera, another photo, knocking them out of the way of the sun to protect them from the flood of sunlight as the moon moves off of the solar disk again. And the collective sigh of relief on the roof as scientific experiments worked themselves out and the cheer from the city, far below, as sunlight returned. There’s nothing like it in the world.
So I was hooked, right then, committed to a career in solar physics. I didn’t see exactly how that would unfold at the time, but I knew it was what I was going to do. I got to see one more eclipse, in Zambia in 2001, but my course was set before that. There’s a direct — if winding — road from that rooftop in Romania to the desk, in the Royal Observatory of Belgium, where I’m writing this now. So thanks, Prof. Pasachoff, for taking me on the trip that launched my life in the sun.
More photos of the eclipse are here. Photos of our 1999 eclipse team are here.
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