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The 11 July 1991 eclipse: The view from Hawaii
Vistas in Astronomy, Vol. 35, pp. 5-7, 1992 Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved.
0083-6656/92 $15.00 © 1992 PergamonPress Ltd
THE 11 JULY 1991 ECLIPSE: THE VIEW FROM HAWAII Nigel Henbest Loosely Row, Buckinghamshire, U. K.
The night before, there isn't much sleep. Not so much out of excitement, but because I am sharing a floor with 50 other journalists - not to mention TV crews, for whom the day begins at 2.00 am. Our makeshift dormitory is the canteen for the construction workers who work on the 4200-metre summit of Mauna Kea: by overnighting at 2800 metres, we should escape the worst of the altitude sickness. Staying at Hale Pohaku has solved another problem: transport. At only four months notice, the BBC World Service asked Heather Couper and me to present a live outside broadcast on the eclipse from Hawaii (while Peter Beer and Andrew Dunn reported from Mexico). Hotels and flights have been block-booked by tour operators literally years before - a blessing in disguise, as our last-minute booking on a package deal has saved a useful sum of money. But all the hire cars on the Big Island have also been booked. Even the usual "Scoop" tactics - like trying to hire a car from the hotel staff - have failed to raise a vehicle. So we headed up the mountain the day before the eclipse in transport laid on by the University of Hawaii. A tour of the summit introduced us to the mighty Keck Telescope: with only nine of its 36 segments in place, it is already a more powerful instrument than the Hale 5-metre. We locate a good observation site for the eclipse, next to the UK Infrared Telescope. This instrument cannot swing low enough to observe the Sun at 7.30 am, the mid-time of totality, and the Joint Astronomy Centre is allowing us to use a phone line from here to the BBC in London. During the night, problems with establishing a good line to London have also been running through my mind and keeping me awake. Transport for the summit is due to leave at 5.00: by 3.45, everyone is up. It's dark outside - darker than a starlit night at Hale Pohaku has any right to be. I peer outside and rain lashes into my face. What a morning for an eclipse! We grab some coffee and orange juice, and hurry the hundred metres up to the waiting minibuses: with the rain and dark punctuated by headlights, revving engines and crowds of excited people, it is a far cry from Hale Pohaku on a normal morning - more like a scene from Quatermass and the Pit. A convoy of a dozen vehicles sets out: it is raining at 3000 metres and 3500 metres, and our faces grow longer. Only as we approach the summit does the cloud begin to thin. Above, the sky is brightening with the ftrst hints of dawn. But it is pink, with light scattered by dust from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. And the dawn is illuminating wisps of cirrus that seem to cover much of the sky.
6
N. Heubest
The Sun rises over the clouds that cover Hilo - at sea-level on the east of the Big Island - and those unfortunates who decided to stay there to watch the eclipse. From the mountain peak, it's soon clear that the weather is unusually inclement: even the normally sunny northwest of the island is under cloud. And as the Moon begins to nibble away at the Sun, some of this cloud begins to boil up over the summit of Manna Kea - normally a phenomenon of the late afternoon. With a bit of hasty resoldering - a task that takes three times longer at this altitude - r v e managed to fix the extension leads that connect our "mutterbox" with its assorted microphones and headphones to a good phone line to London. But, with only a few minutes to spare before going on air, loud Japanese voices suddenly break into our line, drowning out communications both ways. A TV crew is using a walkie-talkie without permission - and they are too far off for anyone to stop them. It's time for desperation measures: tear out all the electronics, and wait for the BBC to call back on an ordinary telephone. The line comes up as the programme is starting. Totality is ten minutes away, and the anchorman in London is plaintively saying "we hone to have a live report on the total eclipse from Hawaii." The Sun is now a narrow crescent; everything around is going grey, and the shadows have sharpened. The sky to the west is dark, but there's no well-defined lunar shadow. Heather is on air, describing the thinning crescent as seen through Mylar film. Sneaking a quick look without a filter, I notice that first magic moment when the Moon suddenly becomes visible as a black circle in the sky - and it takes a moment or two to realise it is because the corona is showing faintly behind the lunar disc, even before the last speck of the photosphere has disappeared from view. Then it's totality - but not total darkness. From this height, we can see beyond the Moon's shadow all around us, to an orange glow along the horizon. This light - plus the cirrus - makes it impossible to see any stars. From Hawaii, there are no planets up for the eclipse. But our eyes are mainly on the Sun itself. A convoluted corona stretches out sideways from the Moon's black disc, in a pair of luminous bat's wings. It looks like a solar minimum corona - but that's because the Sun is on its side in the sky. There's a pink glow at both the top and bottom of the Sun, on either side of its equator. I reach for the binoculars, only to realise that they are at the spot where we first set up, a hundred metres away. One should not move rapidly at the altitude of Mauna Kea. But the totality will last for only four minutes. So I run - snapping on the way a view of the eclipsed Sun over the dome of the University of Hawaii 88-inch telescope. Grabbing the telephone back, I pant out the stunning sight that the binoculars show. A hotbed of small prominences around the lower limb, and a huge pink arch on top of the Sun, twisted at the top like a flame. Above the arch, and continuing its fluted lines, is an intricate network of detail with the texture and colour of the inside of an oyster shell. After the frantic events on the ground, and the speed with which the final fragment of photosphere disappeared, the totality has an amazingly timeless quality - as if someone has freeze-framed the video. We stumble over our words, as we attempt the impossible: to communicate both the look and feel of an eclipse to our worldwide radio audience. And then there's a tiny chink of brilliance next to the large prominence - and a diamond ring that seems to last and last.
The 11 July 1991 Eclipse
7
A crescent of photosphere leaps into view, and the corona is vanquished. To the east of us, a welldefined shadow leaps off towards the waiting eclipse-watchers in Mexico. For us it is over. People wander about in a happy daze; people hug strangers, someone walks past and calls out "that was better than sex" - fortunately we are off-air at the time. I wander over to speak to some of the researchers, to glean some "instant results" for our follow-up programme an hour later. The bad news is that the volcanic dust seems to have scuppered the infrared experiments that were looking for a possible ring of dust around the Sun. But everyone else is overjoyed: the two submillimetre telescopes have made the first measurements of the Sun's diameter at these wavelengths, while the optical astronomers have gained views of the corona in unprecedented detail, both spatial and temporal - with the large prominence thrown in as a bonus. And, just to put paid any idea that research astronomers are mere soulless adjuncts to their instruments, I found that those who had to be incarcerated in observatory buildings had all found some way to watch the totality. Even the most seasoned eclipse-foUowers reckoned that July 1991 had come up with the best show they had seen the text-book eclipse for the next generation.
0083-6656/92 $15.00 © 1992 PergamonPress Ltd
THE 11 JULY 1991 ECLIPSE: THE VIEW FROM HAWAII Nigel Henbest Loosely Row, Buckinghamshire, U. K.
The night before, there isn't much sleep. Not so much out of excitement, but because I am sharing a floor with 50 other journalists - not to mention TV crews, for whom the day begins at 2.00 am. Our makeshift dormitory is the canteen for the construction workers who work on the 4200-metre summit of Mauna Kea: by overnighting at 2800 metres, we should escape the worst of the altitude sickness. Staying at Hale Pohaku has solved another problem: transport. At only four months notice, the BBC World Service asked Heather Couper and me to present a live outside broadcast on the eclipse from Hawaii (while Peter Beer and Andrew Dunn reported from Mexico). Hotels and flights have been block-booked by tour operators literally years before - a blessing in disguise, as our last-minute booking on a package deal has saved a useful sum of money. But all the hire cars on the Big Island have also been booked. Even the usual "Scoop" tactics - like trying to hire a car from the hotel staff - have failed to raise a vehicle. So we headed up the mountain the day before the eclipse in transport laid on by the University of Hawaii. A tour of the summit introduced us to the mighty Keck Telescope: with only nine of its 36 segments in place, it is already a more powerful instrument than the Hale 5-metre. We locate a good observation site for the eclipse, next to the UK Infrared Telescope. This instrument cannot swing low enough to observe the Sun at 7.30 am, the mid-time of totality, and the Joint Astronomy Centre is allowing us to use a phone line from here to the BBC in London. During the night, problems with establishing a good line to London have also been running through my mind and keeping me awake. Transport for the summit is due to leave at 5.00: by 3.45, everyone is up. It's dark outside - darker than a starlit night at Hale Pohaku has any right to be. I peer outside and rain lashes into my face. What a morning for an eclipse! We grab some coffee and orange juice, and hurry the hundred metres up to the waiting minibuses: with the rain and dark punctuated by headlights, revving engines and crowds of excited people, it is a far cry from Hale Pohaku on a normal morning - more like a scene from Quatermass and the Pit. A convoy of a dozen vehicles sets out: it is raining at 3000 metres and 3500 metres, and our faces grow longer. Only as we approach the summit does the cloud begin to thin. Above, the sky is brightening with the ftrst hints of dawn. But it is pink, with light scattered by dust from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. And the dawn is illuminating wisps of cirrus that seem to cover much of the sky.
6
N. Heubest
The Sun rises over the clouds that cover Hilo - at sea-level on the east of the Big Island - and those unfortunates who decided to stay there to watch the eclipse. From the mountain peak, it's soon clear that the weather is unusually inclement: even the normally sunny northwest of the island is under cloud. And as the Moon begins to nibble away at the Sun, some of this cloud begins to boil up over the summit of Manna Kea - normally a phenomenon of the late afternoon. With a bit of hasty resoldering - a task that takes three times longer at this altitude - r v e managed to fix the extension leads that connect our "mutterbox" with its assorted microphones and headphones to a good phone line to London. But, with only a few minutes to spare before going on air, loud Japanese voices suddenly break into our line, drowning out communications both ways. A TV crew is using a walkie-talkie without permission - and they are too far off for anyone to stop them. It's time for desperation measures: tear out all the electronics, and wait for the BBC to call back on an ordinary telephone. The line comes up as the programme is starting. Totality is ten minutes away, and the anchorman in London is plaintively saying "we hone to have a live report on the total eclipse from Hawaii." The Sun is now a narrow crescent; everything around is going grey, and the shadows have sharpened. The sky to the west is dark, but there's no well-defined lunar shadow. Heather is on air, describing the thinning crescent as seen through Mylar film. Sneaking a quick look without a filter, I notice that first magic moment when the Moon suddenly becomes visible as a black circle in the sky - and it takes a moment or two to realise it is because the corona is showing faintly behind the lunar disc, even before the last speck of the photosphere has disappeared from view. Then it's totality - but not total darkness. From this height, we can see beyond the Moon's shadow all around us, to an orange glow along the horizon. This light - plus the cirrus - makes it impossible to see any stars. From Hawaii, there are no planets up for the eclipse. But our eyes are mainly on the Sun itself. A convoluted corona stretches out sideways from the Moon's black disc, in a pair of luminous bat's wings. It looks like a solar minimum corona - but that's because the Sun is on its side in the sky. There's a pink glow at both the top and bottom of the Sun, on either side of its equator. I reach for the binoculars, only to realise that they are at the spot where we first set up, a hundred metres away. One should not move rapidly at the altitude of Mauna Kea. But the totality will last for only four minutes. So I run - snapping on the way a view of the eclipsed Sun over the dome of the University of Hawaii 88-inch telescope. Grabbing the telephone back, I pant out the stunning sight that the binoculars show. A hotbed of small prominences around the lower limb, and a huge pink arch on top of the Sun, twisted at the top like a flame. Above the arch, and continuing its fluted lines, is an intricate network of detail with the texture and colour of the inside of an oyster shell. After the frantic events on the ground, and the speed with which the final fragment of photosphere disappeared, the totality has an amazingly timeless quality - as if someone has freeze-framed the video. We stumble over our words, as we attempt the impossible: to communicate both the look and feel of an eclipse to our worldwide radio audience. And then there's a tiny chink of brilliance next to the large prominence - and a diamond ring that seems to last and last.
The 11 July 1991 Eclipse
7
A crescent of photosphere leaps into view, and the corona is vanquished. To the east of us, a welldefined shadow leaps off towards the waiting eclipse-watchers in Mexico. For us it is over. People wander about in a happy daze; people hug strangers, someone walks past and calls out "that was better than sex" - fortunately we are off-air at the time. I wander over to speak to some of the researchers, to glean some "instant results" for our follow-up programme an hour later. The bad news is that the volcanic dust seems to have scuppered the infrared experiments that were looking for a possible ring of dust around the Sun. But everyone else is overjoyed: the two submillimetre telescopes have made the first measurements of the Sun's diameter at these wavelengths, while the optical astronomers have gained views of the corona in unprecedented detail, both spatial and temporal - with the large prominence thrown in as a bonus. And, just to put paid any idea that research astronomers are mere soulless adjuncts to their instruments, I found that those who had to be incarcerated in observatory buildings had all found some way to watch the totality. Even the most seasoned eclipse-foUowers reckoned that July 1991 had come up with the best show they had seen the text-book eclipse for the next generation.