Shadow Over Asia

This week, on June 19, a sombre strip of darkness fled across one side of the earth as the moon passed in front of the sun. Like a crow's shadow, at dawn the eclipse trailed over Athens, leaped the Golden Horn, spanned the Black Sea, darkened Omsk, Tomsk, Kansk, crossed the Khingan Mountains into Northern Manchukuo, the Japan Sea into the Island of Hokkaido, then passed 2,800 mi. out into the Pacific where it spent itself at sundown.

First total solar eclipse since February 1934, at its broadest, near Lake Baikal, the shadow across Asia's face was 82 miles wide. Length of path: 8,900 miles. Maximum duration of totality: 2 min. 31 1/2 sec. For months past the Soviet Government has been sending lecturers and demonstrators into villages along the eclipse path, so that ignorant peasants would not become terrified and backslide into orgies of religious propitiation.

It is astronomically possible for a solar eclipse to last as long as 7 min. at one spot. Exceptional was this week's performance, not for duration of time or dimensions of shadow path, but because its course ran almost wholly across land. Thus a wide choice of observation sites was available. Eleven parties from the U. S., England, France, Italy, Poland and Japan set up stations somewhere along the totality strip. The U. S. S. R. outfitted 25 expeditions. One group of Russians had balloons with automatic instruments on top, which, in case of bad weather, they planned to send above the clouds.

To get under the conical shadow of the moon, astronomers are willing to travel thousands of miles with cumbersome equipment, spend months of laborious preparation because the fleeting seconds of totality enable them to check whether the solar system is running according to calculations; to observe the effect of masking the sun on radio, weather and other terrestrial phenomena; to study the shape, brightness and composition of the sun's fiery corona. One of the first experimental confirmations of the Theory of Relativity came from an eclipse in 1919. Albert Einstein had predicted that, because the mass of a heavy body imposed a curvature on the space around it, starlight would bend as it passed by the sun. Ordinarily stars close to the sun could not be seen. But, during the eclipse, a star which was actually at the edge of the sun's darkened disk appeared a small distance away from it.

More than a score of spectrum lines have been detected in the light of the corona, but up to this week not one had been positively identified. For a long time it was half-heartedly assumed that there might be a mysterious element called "coronium" in the corona. Three years ago Dr. Donald Howard Menzel of Harvard, unwilling to believe in "coronium," suggested that the spectrum lines supposedly caused by it might really come from excited atoms of oxygen. Of that this week Dr. Menzel hoped to make sure. He is in command of the Harvard-M. I. T. eclipse party stationed at Ak-Bulak, south-west of the Urals. At his disposal is a huge camera weighing 700 lb., made of Dowmetal and geared to follow the sun. Seven spectrographs will be used to cover the whole spectrum from infra-red to ultraviolet. In the Harvard-M. I. T. party of 20 are eight women, including Henrietta Hill Swope, able member of the Harvard Observatory staff and daughter of General Electric Co.'s President Gerard Swope. The Observatory's canny Director Harlow Shapley, who for once stayed in the U. S., took out a $10,000 policy with Lloyd's to insure the expedition against bad weather. Deciding it was a bad risk, however, Lloyd's London office canceled the deal.

The National Geographic Society and Georgetown University sent a group to Kustanai, southeast of the Urals. Headed by the Rev. Paul Aloysius McNally, S. J., of Georgetown, this expedition has four tons of instruments, including a camera which is 14 ft. long, resembles a cannon. With this they hoped to take the first successful color photographs ever made of a total eclipse of the sun.

The equal of this week's eclipse will not be visible anywhere in North America until 1945. Next really spectacular U. S. eclipse is not due until 2017. That one will start in the Pacific, end in the Atlantic, shadow the country from California to the Middle Atlantic coast.

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