Monday’s partial solar eclipse peaked in California at 6:16 p.m

Monday’s partial solar eclipse peaked in California at 6:16 p.m.

source: SF Chroncile Kelly St. John & AP 2002.6.11

Eclipse overshadows the day for astronomy buffs 6 o’clock shadow

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/06/11/BA130389.DTL

Bay Area astronomy buffs turned to the western skies Monday to sneak a peek at an unusual celestial dance: a partial solar eclipse.

“The moon is getting in the way of the sun,” said Rebecca Jewell, 29, who turned out to watch the event at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. “That rocks.”

Bay Area residents peered skyward through telescopes, stared at crescent shapes projected through pin holes and squinted through Mylar filters to get

a look at the annular eclipse. At its maximum in the Bay Area at 6:16 p.m., it covered about two-thirds of the sun’s surface.

In some cases, viewers also improvised.

“I like it a lot, especially after discovering you could look at it through a potato chip bag,” said Cheri Clark, 25, as she squinted through the metallic

sheen of a Sun Chips bag. “Thank *** we’re old enough to appreciate it.”

Larry Brown, a 51-year-old San Francisco resident, strolled along the walkway showing beachgoers a crescent of light reflected onto a piece of white

paper.

Though he attracted an enthusiastic crowd, not everyone was enthralled.

“It’s totally underwhelming,” said Steve Boland, 30, of San Francicso. “Is there any noticeable darkening of the sky? I don’t think so.”

“I saw a total eclipse when I was in the third grade,” Boland said, “and this isn’t measuring up.”

But the eclipse enchanted grown-ups in Berkeley who turned out at the Lawrence Hall of Science, where most of the fun came not from telescopes and

astronomy experts but from impromptu discoveries in the outdoor party atmosphere.

“Look!” shouted Oakland cook Alan Brightbill to his friends. “I’ve got the smallest reproduction of the eclipse.” In his hand was a Polaroid he’d just

taken showing an image of the sun smaller than a pinhead.

“I have to carry around a magnifying glass,” he said, pulling one out with a smile.

“How do you know the sun isn’t green?” demanded James Berg, a Cornell University student home in Berkeley for the summer, addressing his skeptical

friends. He’d brought a welder’s mask whose lens, sure enough, showed the sun to be green.

The director of the planetarium at the Lawrence Hall of Science, Alan Gould, pulled out a pegboard whose holes showed hundreds of suns with moon

bites missing on whatever happened to be behind it.

So Albany High School science teacher George Fosselius jumped down behind it and had his wife take a picture of the dozen eclipses on his face, a

trick quickly followed by others.

“You don’t need high-tech stuff to learn science,” Fosselius said.

Others found that the eclipse made their shadows behave in an odd manner.

“It’s the weirdest thing,” said Alicia Perre-Dowd, a nonprofit administrator in Berkeley, who slowly danced with a friend as they watched the strange

halos or penumbras that bordered their shadows.

One question on everyone’s mind was whether the light actually got dimmer, so resourceful Daily Californian photographers Ian Buchanan and Robert

Katzer took light readings near the peak of the eclipse and half an hour later.

The camera said it needed a 1/250 of a second near the peak of the eclipse but only 1/640 half an hour later — proving that the eclipse did block some

light, even if most people couldn’t tell.

“It’s easy for this thing to go by without noticing anything,” Gould said.

The Bay Area didn’t get the best view of Monday’s eclipse, which began at about 5:15 p.m. and ended before 7 p.m. In Mexico’s Baja California, the

sun’s center was completely blocked out, to reveal a fiery doughnut-shape of sunlight. In San Diego, the moon blocked about three-fourths of the sun.

Paul Doherty, a senior scientist at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, which broadcast a live picture of the eclipse on its Web site, said that the Bay Area

wouldn’t see the likes of Monday’s event for years to come.

A Dec. 4 total eclipse will be visible from southern Africa and Australia, while the next partial eclipse in the United States will be in 2005. The next total

solar eclipse viewable here will be in 2017.

“Eclipses are rare things,” he said. “Rare things are exciting.”

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On the Net:

http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/eclipse.html

http://www.exploratorium.edu

Using this EDU research tool, you can find many more topic pages on eclipses