Shadow Watchers

In the chill, grey dawn, near Malta, Mont., some 250 people waited nervously. John Q. Stewart, Princeton astronomer, and General Electric's James Stokley, old hands who had worked on three previous eclipses, frowned blackly at the cloud-covered eastern sky. They had rehearsed for weeks for this event. They had taken a Lloyds insurance policy against the disaster of a cloudy day. They and their 60 assistants (including famed Princeton Physicist Ira Freeman and his wife), were primed with cameras, light meters, other eclipse-recording paraphernalia.

Some of the laymen were no less anxious than the professionals: Riveter Audrey Korhel, who had come all the way from Seattle to see the sight; Minneapolis Amateur Astronomer W. D. Morgan, who had waited all his life to see a full eclipse; Washington Schoolteacher Wallace Goodlow, who had been making plans for the trip for 13 years.

At 5:30 the crowd broke into a faint cheer. A narrow slit had appeared in the eastern altocumulus cloud bank. As the sun climbed toward the slit and the stop watches ticked on toward the scheduled time, the expedition held its breath. At 6:07 the sun, already in partial eclipse, broke into the clear. At 6:15 on the dot, Dr. Stewart shouted: "Go!"

In the next 30 seconds of full eclipse, the feverish cameramen got a movie record and 36 still pictures, some in color, of the corona. Exactly two minutes and 30 seconds later, the sun, smiling on Dr. Stewart's happy party, disappeared behind the clouds again.

Cascade to Tashkent. War or no war, the July 9 eclipse was one of the best observed in history. The moon's shadow, falling on the earth at 6:14 a.m. at Cascade, Idaho, raced at 47 miles a minute across Montana, Canada, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, disappearing after just two hours and 27 minutes at Tashkent, in Turkestan (see diagram). The total eclipse followed a very narrow path (maximum width: 58 miles, in Greenland), but it covered a long stretch of land area. One of the most elaborately equipped expeditions (a Harvard-led group at Bredenbury, Sask.) missed it completely because of clouds, but scores of other astronomers' parties (the Russians alone had 22) got good observations.

A student in Professor Stewart's party, observing from a plane at 9,000 feet, noticed an effect never seen before: a 15-mile-wide trail of condensed water vapor in the moon's shadow, apparently resulting from the sudden cooling of the earth's atmosphere. In England, physicists used radar to observe stratospheric electrical effects.

Mysterious Corona. Last week's eclipse, whose maximum duration (in Greenland) was 76 seconds, raised to a bare two and a quarter hours the total recorded observation of eclipses by modern science. Much of the scientific interest centers around the corona, which extends for millions of miles from the sun's surface. The corona,'most scientists think, is created by electromagnetic radiation and is probably related to the sun's magnetism and sunspots. Astrophysicists argue mildly among themselves about what its incandescent elements are (perhaps calcium, hydrogen, helium). The corona gives off a strange light, differing from sunlight and visible only when the sun's rays are blotted out by the moon.

Scientists are puzzled by the fact that the corona (about 1,000,000DEG C.) is vastly hotter than the sun itself (6,000DEG). Scientists hope that study of the photographs and other observations made last week will tell them more about the corona, the deflection of stars' light rays by the sun, the moon's "falling shadow" (which Professor Stewart's party was in a particularly good position to observe, because it saw the eclipse very soon after sunrise, low on the horizon).

Last week's total eclipse, the first seen in the U.S. since 1932, was one of a series that began near the North Pole in 1639 and is moving south. Some scientists hope to observe the next eclipse (June 30, 1954) from stratospheric rocket ships.

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