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Chasing The Moon’s Shadow
0022-5347/02/1684-1671/0 THE JOURNAL OF UROLOGY® Copyright © 2002 by AMERICAN UROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, INC.®
Vol. 168, 1671–1673, October 2002 Printed in U.S.A.
DOI: 10.1097/01.ju.0000030719.78258.4b
CHASING THE MOON’S SHADOW PHILIP G. RANSLEY PEDIATRIC UROLOGY MEDAL RECIPIENT Dr. David Diamond, thank you very much indeed for those wonderfully kind and generous words. It is an immense privilege for me to join that short roll of much more distinguished people. I would also like to thank Dr. Gil Rushton as chairman and the selection committee but above all, the fellowship of this section, who have been my sparring partners in debate during the last 20 years. At times, it has been a little like a nuclear furnace, and what emerges is the Pediatric Urology Medal like a black hole from the center. Into this Medal is encapsulated all those discussions on so many things; all that hot air on reflux, all the bottles of good Chardonnay poured into the valve bladder and those powerful storms created by prenatal diagnosis. All are sucked in and compacted in here never to escape. In return for the privilege of the Pediatric Urology Medal, I would like to lead you into my other life, a life dominated by gravity and its sales rep, time. It has been brought home to us very forcibly very recently how gravity rules our lives and how it governs everything that moves in the universe. This medal has mass and, therefore, is subject to gravity. If I let go, it would fall to the floor. It is about 10 cm. in diameter, and if we hold it up at a distance of about 5 m. it would subtend an angle of half a degree, just enough to cover the sun. There is no better way to wonder at celestial mechanisms than through a total eclipse of the sun. So let the moon be our medal and let me lead you into the world of eclipse chasers. An eclipse is a wonderful event. It can be viewed and enjoyed at any level, from the simple aesthetic beauty seen with the naked eye, or it can be timed, observed, photographed and analyzed with highly sophisticated gear. You can simply marvel at the beauty of the diamond ring or gaze in wonder at the silvery corona. If you wonder where some of your tax dollars are going, I can tell you that Fred Espenak is spending them. He is NASA’s eclipse expert and a foremost authority on the phenomenon. The word “anorak” probably does not translate easily into the American language. According to the dictionary, it is an article of clothing, generally waterproof and often brightly colored. However, long before the film “Trainspotting” hit the screens, the word had already entered the English language to mean something else and probably the best definition that I can come up with is someone who is “. . . driven by obsession in the pursuit of triviality.” Therefore, eclipse chasers probably rank with bird watchers, gastronomes and opera lovers to say nothing of presenters at AAP meetings. An eclipse puts me in touch with the rhythm of the universe. Everyone seeks some link to their origins, and gazing at the sky takes you further back than any family tree. The universe is in constant motion controlled by gravity. Stars are born and die. They live their lives and explode, scattering their entrails through the cosmos. What you must remember is that after the “Big Bang,” there was only hydrogen and helium. Every element heavier than that was made inside a star that exploded and disgorged its heavy metals through the universe. Every carbon atom in the forest, every oxygen atom in the air and water, every silicone atom in every grain of sand and all the iron in your hemoglobin were made inside a star. Comets fly by bringing water and life. Probably all the water in our oceans was brought here by comet impact, and they may have brought life forms with
them as well. There were a couple of life forms on the mountain that night when the comet Hyutake was seen. There is a beautiful rhythm in moonrise and rhythm in sunset. But there is nothing to compare with standing high on the Bolivian Altiplano in the center of the cone of the moon’s shadow with sunset all around and the eclipsed sun hanging in the darkness. Here, the majestic progression of time is played out before your eyes. An eclipse is quite an extraordinary coincidence. The sun is 400 times larger than the moon. By coincidence it is exactly 400 times farther away, and so the moon just covers the sun. But beware! We live in special times. The moon is moving away from us by a few centimeters each year. That is more than a meter further away than it was when I started coming to AAP meetings, and after only 2,000 million more annual meetings the moon will have moved so far away it can no longer cover the sun. So, at this moment the moon casts a shadow which just reaches the surface of the earth, producing a spot about 100 km. in diameter, and as the shadow sweeps across the surface of the earth, it makes a track of totality which is 100 km. wide and up to several thousand kilometers long. Only within this narrow zone are the beauties of a total eclipse revealed. However, because of the varying geometry of the distance of the moon from the earth and the earth-moon system from the sun it does not always quite reach, and when that happens the moon passes harmlessly across the face of the sun leaving a ring of sunshine all around—an annular eclipse—and no total eclipse occurs. There are times when it just fits almost exactly and the irregular mountains of the edge just occlude the sun’s disk at various points all the way around, creating a moment of exquisite beauty which lasts for only a few seconds. This is known as an annular total eclipse. The earth’s shadow is much larger to catch the moon and produce a lunar eclipse. I will show you the moon and the eclipsed moon passing through the earth’s shadow, which is projected onto the night sky. It is quite a spectacular demonstration of the physics of eclipse. Of course, the moon can only eclipse the sun when it passes between the earth and the sun, and the nature of its orbit limits the number of occasions when this occurs. The moon goes round the earth once a month. If the orbits of the earth and the moon were in exactly the same plane, we would see an eclipse of the sun every month and I would not be giving this talk! However, the moon’s orbit is angled at 5 degrees to that of the earth so that only when the moon crosses the plane of the earth’s orbit (known as the lunar nodes) and this point is exactly in the direction of the sun can an eclipse occur. As a consequence there are 2 occasions each year (eclipse seasons) when it is possible for the moon to get in front of the sun and eclipse it. Because these nodes move very slowly, the eclipse season moves forward by about a month each year and you can predict the eclipses that are going to occur in the next 20 years. The next few years are rather sparse for full total eclipses of the sun, and it is important that meetings should not coincide with these important events. You will be relieved to know that the APAPU meeting in Hong Kong in 2002 is delicately timed to take place just after the event in Australia! So, you can see my travel plans for the next few years. Some of them are easy, some of them are difficult and tactics can be a problem. We will probably need a chartered 747 to do the 2003 event because it is on the Indian Ocean side of Antarctica and very inaccessible. Then
1671
1672
CHASING MOON’S SHADOW
FIG. 1. Diamond ring
we will be back in Mongolia again, the significance of which you will see in a moment. The eclipse track of any totality can vary in width up to about 200 km. under the most favorable circumstances but generally it is about 100 to 120 km. Large portions of them often lie over water, which is not surprising since the surface of the planet is largely water. The June 2001 track took us canoeing up the Zambezi this year and there is 2006 which will take us deep into the Sahara desert. An eclipse occurs at any 1 point on earth about once every 400 years. If you were a peasant born just before the second World War, scratching a living out of a little patch of soil in Kazakhstan where 3 tracks intercept, by the time you were 12 or 15 years old you would think that eclipses were really quite common! Eclipses used to have a scientific value. They have little scientific value now because we have put a spacecraft part way towards the sun. The SOHO spacecraft now sits at the stationary point balanced by gravity between the earth and the sun and makes observations of the sun every day. As a consequence you can look at the sun live on the Web whenever you feel like it. Of real importance is that this satellite can warn us of charged particles emitted from outbursts from the sun that can lead to big electricity shutdowns and satellite damage. You may remember the Canadian shutdown some years ago, which was due to a storm on the sun which sent charged particles into our magnetic field, setting up such oscillations that they induced high currents in the North American grid system which blew the transformers. Nowadays, when the SOHO spacecraft tells us that these particles are coming, there is enough warning for the electric companies worldwide to disconnect their networks from each other to reduce the size of the induced current. Of course, eclipses were very important for the proof of Einstein’s Principle of Relativity and the prediction that gravity would bend light. The simplest way of proving this was to demonstrate the apparent change in position of distant stars seen close to the sun, which obviously is only possible during the course of an eclipse. A German team was the first to set off into Russia and try to prove this by photographing the stars behind the sun during an eclipse, just before the first World War. Unfortunately, war was declared while they were there, and they were interred and the equipment confiscated. The Americans had a crack on home soil in 1918 but it was cloudy! Therefore, it was left to an amazing group of English astronomers who in the years of terrible deprivation towards the end of the first World War somehow managed to persuade the government to fund an expedition to Friendship Bay, a Portuguese Island off the West Coast of Africa. Now, that is something special in terms of grant writing (!!), especially as it had to provide for some of them to
stay there for 6 months to photograph the same star field after the sun had moved out of the way. They proved that gravity bends light. When we look at the sun we just see its surface, the photosphere, the yellow disk shining at 15 million degrees. On the surface we see the sunspots and from this level erupt the prominences. Overlying this is a beautiful delicate pink layer, the chromosphere with spicules leading out into the corona. Only during an eclipse can we simple mortals see these things. The sun is extraordinary. It has to be constant in its output of light and heat to within ⫾ 2% or we would freeze or fry. It has worked within ⫾ 2% for about 5,000 million years and will continue to do that for about another 8,000 million years. The sun has a cycle of activity every 11 years (sunspot cycle) and its impact can be seen in a graph showing the inverse relationship between the number of sunspots and the price of wheat in 300 years. It makes you realize the delicate balance of our planet. For us it is only during an eclipse that we can visualize the beauty of the corona, and it is so wonderful that some plan years ahead for these moments of ecstasy. The morning of setting up I can tell you is electric with anticipation. Sometimes it is wild, high, clear and cold. Sometimes it is warm and luscious at sea level, and we jostle for deck space for our equipment. But you do not win them all. By plane to Ulaan Bator in Mongolia and by coach for 6 hours up to the Siberian border it was clear as a bell until 2 hours before and then it snowed. The eclipse came of course, but all that happens is that it just gets darker and then you go home. When it works it is wonderful. As the moment gets nearer you check your watches and peer through the telescope waiting for that little bite of first contact. “It’s going to happen!” some wag shouts, usually American. The west is getting darker. Now tension mounts as the moon advances. Is your scope tracking properly? Are the batteries okay? Shall you change film now? Can you remember the exposure sequence? The shadow is coming! Oh wow! The diamond ring, the last ray of sunshine down a lunar valley (fig. 1). Look up, snatch a glance, the shadow there in the west like thunder. This is your special moment. You, the moon and the sun in line. Gravity and time are your friends just for this moment. The diamond ring fades. The color changes as it fades more and prominences leap into view. The beautiful chromosphere shines out (fig. 2) and as the eyes adapt the corona floods out with the same silvery brightness as moonlight (fig. 3). Eyes adapt further and the corona extends (fig. 4). Everything is still and calm. There are hushed whispers. There is an erotic tension like an exaggerated pause in the slow movement of a great piece of music. A quick change of eye piece. Don’t drop
FIG. 2. Chromosphere
1673
CHASING MOON’S SHADOW
FIG. 3. Inner corona
FIG. 4. Outer corona
it, don’t knock the scope, work your way around the perimeter. More prominences, giant silent eruptions that would engulf the earth; indeed a thousand earths; the chromosphere peeping through the mountains on the rim. You take your eye away from all this technology and just gaze at the sky and wonder at celestial mechanics frozen for a moment. But you can not stop it. There is a tell-tale brightening on the other limb. The first Bailey’s beads of sunshine peep through the irregular mountains of the edge and tiptoe sideways for a fleeting second. They get bigger and bigger, and we are rewarded with a new diamond even better than the first, like a farewell kiss. And then it is over. A happy crowd celebrates the experience of a lifetime. In 1999 the track of the eclipse went right across Europe and there was a possibility that more people would see an eclipse in that 1 day than had ever seen an eclipse in the whole of human history because it not only went through the populated areas of Europe but on through the Near East and to Karachi. Irene Oesch, who is known to many of you, naturally organized in her own inimitable way for the track to run through her own back garden in Salzburg! We spent a year in the planning, getting half a dozen telescopes into the garden set up and ready for everyone to use but it was raining. I myself spent the night glued to the Internet watching the cloud move and trying to decide whether to move everybody away from this comfortable place. But at the crucial moment along came a hole of clear blue sky and we were rewarded again with the most beautiful corona shining through clear air freshened by the rain. At the precise moment that our photograph of totality in Salzburg was taken, a NASA satellite was overhead recording from space the moon’s shadow falling on Austria as it raced across Europe. It’s looking down and we’re down there looking up. Ten minutes later it was raining but we didn’t care. And so this June took us to Africa paddling the Zambezi to try and find the spot for the longest eclipse for some years to come. I cannot escape lecturing even there. We encountered a Spanish television crew who seemed to have little idea of eclipse events, and so I spent some time scratching in the sand speaking part Italian and part English to try and tell them what they had to look for. All the gear survived the journey but we didn’t know what was going to happen to the
hippos and the elephants during the course of totality. Even on the Internet the literature on hippopotamus behavior during totality is somewhat limited. It was a privilege to experience this primeval landscape at the moment of an eclipse. There were lions “snorting” all around as an incredible diamond ring hung in the sky for ages and ages and ages. The monkeys were chattering as they took to the trees. The birds came noisily into roost. As for the hippos, they stayed where they were as we watched the diamond fade from view in a sky imprinted on our memories forever. Meeting as we do in the shadow not of the moon, but of the events of September 11th I would like to finish with a quotation from the late Carl Sagan called “A Pale Blue Dot.” One can look at a picture of the Earth taken in 1990 from 3.7 billion miles by the Voyager spacecraft. . . . Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in history lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatred. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we hold some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve every known.
Vol. 168, 1671–1673, October 2002 Printed in U.S.A.
DOI: 10.1097/01.ju.0000030719.78258.4b
CHASING THE MOON’S SHADOW PHILIP G. RANSLEY PEDIATRIC UROLOGY MEDAL RECIPIENT Dr. David Diamond, thank you very much indeed for those wonderfully kind and generous words. It is an immense privilege for me to join that short roll of much more distinguished people. I would also like to thank Dr. Gil Rushton as chairman and the selection committee but above all, the fellowship of this section, who have been my sparring partners in debate during the last 20 years. At times, it has been a little like a nuclear furnace, and what emerges is the Pediatric Urology Medal like a black hole from the center. Into this Medal is encapsulated all those discussions on so many things; all that hot air on reflux, all the bottles of good Chardonnay poured into the valve bladder and those powerful storms created by prenatal diagnosis. All are sucked in and compacted in here never to escape. In return for the privilege of the Pediatric Urology Medal, I would like to lead you into my other life, a life dominated by gravity and its sales rep, time. It has been brought home to us very forcibly very recently how gravity rules our lives and how it governs everything that moves in the universe. This medal has mass and, therefore, is subject to gravity. If I let go, it would fall to the floor. It is about 10 cm. in diameter, and if we hold it up at a distance of about 5 m. it would subtend an angle of half a degree, just enough to cover the sun. There is no better way to wonder at celestial mechanisms than through a total eclipse of the sun. So let the moon be our medal and let me lead you into the world of eclipse chasers. An eclipse is a wonderful event. It can be viewed and enjoyed at any level, from the simple aesthetic beauty seen with the naked eye, or it can be timed, observed, photographed and analyzed with highly sophisticated gear. You can simply marvel at the beauty of the diamond ring or gaze in wonder at the silvery corona. If you wonder where some of your tax dollars are going, I can tell you that Fred Espenak is spending them. He is NASA’s eclipse expert and a foremost authority on the phenomenon. The word “anorak” probably does not translate easily into the American language. According to the dictionary, it is an article of clothing, generally waterproof and often brightly colored. However, long before the film “Trainspotting” hit the screens, the word had already entered the English language to mean something else and probably the best definition that I can come up with is someone who is “. . . driven by obsession in the pursuit of triviality.” Therefore, eclipse chasers probably rank with bird watchers, gastronomes and opera lovers to say nothing of presenters at AAP meetings. An eclipse puts me in touch with the rhythm of the universe. Everyone seeks some link to their origins, and gazing at the sky takes you further back than any family tree. The universe is in constant motion controlled by gravity. Stars are born and die. They live their lives and explode, scattering their entrails through the cosmos. What you must remember is that after the “Big Bang,” there was only hydrogen and helium. Every element heavier than that was made inside a star that exploded and disgorged its heavy metals through the universe. Every carbon atom in the forest, every oxygen atom in the air and water, every silicone atom in every grain of sand and all the iron in your hemoglobin were made inside a star. Comets fly by bringing water and life. Probably all the water in our oceans was brought here by comet impact, and they may have brought life forms with
them as well. There were a couple of life forms on the mountain that night when the comet Hyutake was seen. There is a beautiful rhythm in moonrise and rhythm in sunset. But there is nothing to compare with standing high on the Bolivian Altiplano in the center of the cone of the moon’s shadow with sunset all around and the eclipsed sun hanging in the darkness. Here, the majestic progression of time is played out before your eyes. An eclipse is quite an extraordinary coincidence. The sun is 400 times larger than the moon. By coincidence it is exactly 400 times farther away, and so the moon just covers the sun. But beware! We live in special times. The moon is moving away from us by a few centimeters each year. That is more than a meter further away than it was when I started coming to AAP meetings, and after only 2,000 million more annual meetings the moon will have moved so far away it can no longer cover the sun. So, at this moment the moon casts a shadow which just reaches the surface of the earth, producing a spot about 100 km. in diameter, and as the shadow sweeps across the surface of the earth, it makes a track of totality which is 100 km. wide and up to several thousand kilometers long. Only within this narrow zone are the beauties of a total eclipse revealed. However, because of the varying geometry of the distance of the moon from the earth and the earth-moon system from the sun it does not always quite reach, and when that happens the moon passes harmlessly across the face of the sun leaving a ring of sunshine all around—an annular eclipse—and no total eclipse occurs. There are times when it just fits almost exactly and the irregular mountains of the edge just occlude the sun’s disk at various points all the way around, creating a moment of exquisite beauty which lasts for only a few seconds. This is known as an annular total eclipse. The earth’s shadow is much larger to catch the moon and produce a lunar eclipse. I will show you the moon and the eclipsed moon passing through the earth’s shadow, which is projected onto the night sky. It is quite a spectacular demonstration of the physics of eclipse. Of course, the moon can only eclipse the sun when it passes between the earth and the sun, and the nature of its orbit limits the number of occasions when this occurs. The moon goes round the earth once a month. If the orbits of the earth and the moon were in exactly the same plane, we would see an eclipse of the sun every month and I would not be giving this talk! However, the moon’s orbit is angled at 5 degrees to that of the earth so that only when the moon crosses the plane of the earth’s orbit (known as the lunar nodes) and this point is exactly in the direction of the sun can an eclipse occur. As a consequence there are 2 occasions each year (eclipse seasons) when it is possible for the moon to get in front of the sun and eclipse it. Because these nodes move very slowly, the eclipse season moves forward by about a month each year and you can predict the eclipses that are going to occur in the next 20 years. The next few years are rather sparse for full total eclipses of the sun, and it is important that meetings should not coincide with these important events. You will be relieved to know that the APAPU meeting in Hong Kong in 2002 is delicately timed to take place just after the event in Australia! So, you can see my travel plans for the next few years. Some of them are easy, some of them are difficult and tactics can be a problem. We will probably need a chartered 747 to do the 2003 event because it is on the Indian Ocean side of Antarctica and very inaccessible. Then
1671
1672
CHASING MOON’S SHADOW
FIG. 1. Diamond ring
we will be back in Mongolia again, the significance of which you will see in a moment. The eclipse track of any totality can vary in width up to about 200 km. under the most favorable circumstances but generally it is about 100 to 120 km. Large portions of them often lie over water, which is not surprising since the surface of the planet is largely water. The June 2001 track took us canoeing up the Zambezi this year and there is 2006 which will take us deep into the Sahara desert. An eclipse occurs at any 1 point on earth about once every 400 years. If you were a peasant born just before the second World War, scratching a living out of a little patch of soil in Kazakhstan where 3 tracks intercept, by the time you were 12 or 15 years old you would think that eclipses were really quite common! Eclipses used to have a scientific value. They have little scientific value now because we have put a spacecraft part way towards the sun. The SOHO spacecraft now sits at the stationary point balanced by gravity between the earth and the sun and makes observations of the sun every day. As a consequence you can look at the sun live on the Web whenever you feel like it. Of real importance is that this satellite can warn us of charged particles emitted from outbursts from the sun that can lead to big electricity shutdowns and satellite damage. You may remember the Canadian shutdown some years ago, which was due to a storm on the sun which sent charged particles into our magnetic field, setting up such oscillations that they induced high currents in the North American grid system which blew the transformers. Nowadays, when the SOHO spacecraft tells us that these particles are coming, there is enough warning for the electric companies worldwide to disconnect their networks from each other to reduce the size of the induced current. Of course, eclipses were very important for the proof of Einstein’s Principle of Relativity and the prediction that gravity would bend light. The simplest way of proving this was to demonstrate the apparent change in position of distant stars seen close to the sun, which obviously is only possible during the course of an eclipse. A German team was the first to set off into Russia and try to prove this by photographing the stars behind the sun during an eclipse, just before the first World War. Unfortunately, war was declared while they were there, and they were interred and the equipment confiscated. The Americans had a crack on home soil in 1918 but it was cloudy! Therefore, it was left to an amazing group of English astronomers who in the years of terrible deprivation towards the end of the first World War somehow managed to persuade the government to fund an expedition to Friendship Bay, a Portuguese Island off the West Coast of Africa. Now, that is something special in terms of grant writing (!!), especially as it had to provide for some of them to
stay there for 6 months to photograph the same star field after the sun had moved out of the way. They proved that gravity bends light. When we look at the sun we just see its surface, the photosphere, the yellow disk shining at 15 million degrees. On the surface we see the sunspots and from this level erupt the prominences. Overlying this is a beautiful delicate pink layer, the chromosphere with spicules leading out into the corona. Only during an eclipse can we simple mortals see these things. The sun is extraordinary. It has to be constant in its output of light and heat to within ⫾ 2% or we would freeze or fry. It has worked within ⫾ 2% for about 5,000 million years and will continue to do that for about another 8,000 million years. The sun has a cycle of activity every 11 years (sunspot cycle) and its impact can be seen in a graph showing the inverse relationship between the number of sunspots and the price of wheat in 300 years. It makes you realize the delicate balance of our planet. For us it is only during an eclipse that we can visualize the beauty of the corona, and it is so wonderful that some plan years ahead for these moments of ecstasy. The morning of setting up I can tell you is electric with anticipation. Sometimes it is wild, high, clear and cold. Sometimes it is warm and luscious at sea level, and we jostle for deck space for our equipment. But you do not win them all. By plane to Ulaan Bator in Mongolia and by coach for 6 hours up to the Siberian border it was clear as a bell until 2 hours before and then it snowed. The eclipse came of course, but all that happens is that it just gets darker and then you go home. When it works it is wonderful. As the moment gets nearer you check your watches and peer through the telescope waiting for that little bite of first contact. “It’s going to happen!” some wag shouts, usually American. The west is getting darker. Now tension mounts as the moon advances. Is your scope tracking properly? Are the batteries okay? Shall you change film now? Can you remember the exposure sequence? The shadow is coming! Oh wow! The diamond ring, the last ray of sunshine down a lunar valley (fig. 1). Look up, snatch a glance, the shadow there in the west like thunder. This is your special moment. You, the moon and the sun in line. Gravity and time are your friends just for this moment. The diamond ring fades. The color changes as it fades more and prominences leap into view. The beautiful chromosphere shines out (fig. 2) and as the eyes adapt the corona floods out with the same silvery brightness as moonlight (fig. 3). Eyes adapt further and the corona extends (fig. 4). Everything is still and calm. There are hushed whispers. There is an erotic tension like an exaggerated pause in the slow movement of a great piece of music. A quick change of eye piece. Don’t drop
FIG. 2. Chromosphere
1673
CHASING MOON’S SHADOW
FIG. 3. Inner corona
FIG. 4. Outer corona
it, don’t knock the scope, work your way around the perimeter. More prominences, giant silent eruptions that would engulf the earth; indeed a thousand earths; the chromosphere peeping through the mountains on the rim. You take your eye away from all this technology and just gaze at the sky and wonder at celestial mechanics frozen for a moment. But you can not stop it. There is a tell-tale brightening on the other limb. The first Bailey’s beads of sunshine peep through the irregular mountains of the edge and tiptoe sideways for a fleeting second. They get bigger and bigger, and we are rewarded with a new diamond even better than the first, like a farewell kiss. And then it is over. A happy crowd celebrates the experience of a lifetime. In 1999 the track of the eclipse went right across Europe and there was a possibility that more people would see an eclipse in that 1 day than had ever seen an eclipse in the whole of human history because it not only went through the populated areas of Europe but on through the Near East and to Karachi. Irene Oesch, who is known to many of you, naturally organized in her own inimitable way for the track to run through her own back garden in Salzburg! We spent a year in the planning, getting half a dozen telescopes into the garden set up and ready for everyone to use but it was raining. I myself spent the night glued to the Internet watching the cloud move and trying to decide whether to move everybody away from this comfortable place. But at the crucial moment along came a hole of clear blue sky and we were rewarded again with the most beautiful corona shining through clear air freshened by the rain. At the precise moment that our photograph of totality in Salzburg was taken, a NASA satellite was overhead recording from space the moon’s shadow falling on Austria as it raced across Europe. It’s looking down and we’re down there looking up. Ten minutes later it was raining but we didn’t care. And so this June took us to Africa paddling the Zambezi to try and find the spot for the longest eclipse for some years to come. I cannot escape lecturing even there. We encountered a Spanish television crew who seemed to have little idea of eclipse events, and so I spent some time scratching in the sand speaking part Italian and part English to try and tell them what they had to look for. All the gear survived the journey but we didn’t know what was going to happen to the
hippos and the elephants during the course of totality. Even on the Internet the literature on hippopotamus behavior during totality is somewhat limited. It was a privilege to experience this primeval landscape at the moment of an eclipse. There were lions “snorting” all around as an incredible diamond ring hung in the sky for ages and ages and ages. The monkeys were chattering as they took to the trees. The birds came noisily into roost. As for the hippos, they stayed where they were as we watched the diamond fade from view in a sky imprinted on our memories forever. Meeting as we do in the shadow not of the moon, but of the events of September 11th I would like to finish with a quotation from the late Carl Sagan called “A Pale Blue Dot.” One can look at a picture of the Earth taken in 1990 from 3.7 billion miles by the Voyager spacecraft. . . . Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in history lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatred. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we hold some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve every known.