Azimuth to Zenith

Moonshadows Past and Present

By Caitlin Hawke

Who can forget where they were when their first solar eclipse occurred?  Memories of admonitions not to look skyward and of instructions on how to make a pinhole viewer on the playground macadam came flooding back these past weeks as eclispe-mania ramped up to fever pitch.  I tried to resist the hype but then I realized there might not be many more to behold.  We have to wait 'til 2024 to top this one in NYC and after that I can't say.

Nostalgia really came home to roost when every radio spot about the upcoming eclipse recalled Carly Simon's immortalization of the 1970 eclipse in her 45-year old and still inscrutable hit "You're So Vain":

1970 Path of Totality

Well I hear you went to Saratoga
And your horse, naturally, won
Then you flew your Learjet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun
Well, you're where you should be all the time
And when you're not, you're with some underworld spy
Or the wife of a close friend,
Wife of a close friend...

That got me leafing through pages and pages on the internet. It's actually sort of fun to look at old eclipse coverage.  I turned up the March 1, 1970, New York Times front page piece that made me chuckle about the math. You might enjoy it, too.

I'm not the only one thinking back to bygone solar blackouts. In an excellent blog post on the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group's site, Pam Tice unearthed some local history about the 1925 eclipse, also known as "The West 96 Eclipse."  It seems the edge of total darkness was miscaluated and that, in fact, W. 96th Street was the cut off, not further south as predicted.  Bedeviling azimuths! I recommend reading the post in full here.  While you are on the group's site, take a noodle through it. It's a remarkable achievement to have all this neighborhood information in one place.

And today, August 21, 2017, we get to make new memories, with five-year-olds just starting kindergarten who now have their chance to learn about DIY pinhole viewers on the playground macadam, to return to a bit of much-needed innocence, and to experience the wonderment of our mind-boggling galaxy. 





And now for a hidden track.

Totally of its era and sticking with my 70s lookback, the video below by Manfred Mann serves as a nice outro today.  A lagniappe for readers of a certain age who remember the zeniths and nadirs of the 1970s.

Be careful out there.  Ours is one hot star.

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