Bright Ideas

August 21, 2017, showed the sky get darker, and the sun falling behind the shadow of the moon in partial or total darkness. Viewers were wearing special glasses, or looking through a pin-hole camera that shows the image of the shadow of the moon over the sun. Carter County saw it in 90% totality.

In February of 1979, I witnessed the same thing in Billings. It was my first day at the Vo-Tech, studying drafting. We left the classroom and witnessed the solar eclipse on the sidewalk. My father-in-law journeyed north to take pictures the Carter County Museum still has. How did he do that? What filters did he use? Why didn’t anyone ask him, and write down the answer so we might do the same this year?

How did early man feel as air cooled and skies darken? Did he fear the gods or their subsequent actions? What did he do? He and we just waited; that’s all you could do, but Chinese had other answers. They thought the sun was eaten by a dragon! What did they think when it reappeared?

It has been going on as long as the earth has had a moon. Early astronomers predicted eclipses. How did they do that? Oh I wish that had happened when we lived in Coonarabran, New South Wales, Australia from January 1976 to May 1977. Just outside of town, in the Warrambungle Mountains, sat the large, Siding Springs Observatory. It was an Anglo/Australian project, with several huge telescopes, mapping the southern sky. They would have known how to photograph the sun, as it was covered by the moon.

Imagine it; the puny little moon covering the entire image of the sun!

I’m sure eclipses happened when early settlers traveled west. Did they worry or just wonder? What about Native Americans or still earlier, after the Ice Age, with migrating people coming into the area we now call Montana?

There will be another eclipse in seven years, but it won’t cross Montana. Until then, I’ll just bide my time as productively as I can. Television will show it to us. When will the next solar eclipse cross Montana?

I won’t live that long, I’m sure, but maybe some of the viewers in grade school will enjoy the view, or travel to enjoy it as adults. Would one of those little kids become an astronomer? Viewing the August 21, 2017, solar eclipse could influence their choice of future career.