Next Year, the Sahara

When the Giliaks of Sakhalin island and the Koryaks of Kamchatka rubbed the sleep out of their eyes one morning last week, they rubbed a second time and looked up in surprise: the rising sun was black. It was totally eclipsed by the moon. As eclipses go, this one had relatively few observers--at least of its totality. The path of complete blackout crossed the most sparsely inhabited wastes of Asia and North America, favoring only Canada's southeasternmost provinces before crossing the Atlantic to fizzle out at sunset near the Azores. Most big-city dwellers had to content themselves with partial obscuration: 88% in Montreal, 80% in New York and 40% in Miami.

Many astronomers took a dim view of the event, partly because most sites for observing totality were inaccessible, partly because they expected heavy cloud cover to prevail in high latitudes, and also because nowhere did totality last longer than 2 min. 35.6 sec. Moreover, scientists are divided as to the value of studying eclipses. The Young Turks in the field say condescendingly that it's an old man's game, an occasion for repeating familiar experiments. The old hands retort that there is still much that can best be learned during eclipses. Even if they are repeating experiments, they are doing so with progressively more sophisticated instruments and getting more detailed results.

Racing a Shadow. As it happened, the cloud cover was broken, and some of the observation sites had clear views. To run experiments that cannot be done through dense atmosphere, several scientific groups rocketed their instruments as high as 130 miles from Alaska's Poker Flat, White Sands, N. Mex., and East Quoddy, N.S. The moon's shadow raced across Canada at a speed around 2,000 m.p.h., so chasing it at anything below Mach 2 could not be very productive. But one group, headed by Dr. Arthur Cox of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, took off from Spokane in a jet transport, intercepted the shadow near Hudson Bay and raced it. At a speed of 565 m.p.h., they gained almost two minutes for their studies of the corona.

It is the corona that still holds the interest of most eclipse scientists. A halo of gases at temperatures up to 2,000,000DEG F., it extends millions of miles outward from the sun. One of last week's projects was an effort to probe its outer reaches, the spawning ground of the solar wind. Another project was to analyze the spectral lines made in the corona by trace amounts of metals.

Perhaps the most intriguing experiment was that of Harvard's Dr. James Baker, designer of optical systems. He had constructed a special camera and lens apparatus to black out the corona and search through the resulting darkness for objects within the orbit of Mercury. Astronomers have long talked about a hidden planet near the sun, tentatively named Vulcan, and Baker hoped to find this, or hitherto unseen comets. Only weeks of analysis will show whether he succeeded.

Other experiments concerned with X rays from the sun and their relation to its magnetic field were frankly trial runs for the big-time eclipse due June 30, 1973. That one will not be visible from mainland North America, and the best views, with a generous seven-minute totality, will be against the usually cloudless deep blue skies over North Africa. "Next year, the Sahara!" was the cry of astronomers who looked down their noses rather than up at the sun last week.

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