Two medieval beings chatted about the science of astronomy in the late 15th century.
One marvelled, “The Renaissance is just barely beginning, and soon we’re supposed to become great painters, poets, scientists and philosophers, and already, scientists know the names of most of the planets. Without having traveled into outer space, how could anyone know these things?”
Using the primitive instruments of past centuries, astronomers really must have worked hard. In this day, we marvel at the precision with which experts can predict things like the just-passed Annular Eclipse. They had it down to the minute.
We were told it’s dangerous to look at this kind of eclipse, but even for those who dared, what was there but a blinding light?
This time, my family became actively involved in eclipse-watch ing, inspired by a pair of special glasses our friend Chad Boliek loaned us. When I first put them on, I saw nothing. Then, looking toward the sun — hours before the actual eclipse — I could see only one thing: the sun, naturally.
This pair of lenses, which look like what we wore during 3-D movies of yesteryear, at first appeared totally dark, nothing like a pair of really dark glasses through whose lenses our eyes can eventually adjust. Rather, I felt like a welder, although once I peeked through that hood, I could make out some faint images.
Of course, a huge bank of rain-promising clouds picked that exact time to cover the sun.
“Let me see!” my granddaughter Celina shouted when her dad, Diego, finally took in the view. Celina said it looked at first like a shrimp superimposed over a plate. Using my nude eyes (if eyes can be naked, they can also be nude), I saw nothing but a painful glare.
Through the glasses, I then saw the fullest eclipse, the moon dead-center over the sun, with only the outer edge visible. That image lasted only a minute or two. Then, as the western hills began blocking out the sun entirely, all we could see was a sliver. The term “annular” does not refer to years, but to the ring that appears when the moon occludes the sun. “Annular” is like the Spanish word for ring, “anillo.”
I tried photographing the eclipse, but all I got was a vertical bar on all the images. Maybe my daddy was right when he told me never to point a camera directly at the sun, and Mom said never to even look at the sun.
Finally, my wife Bonnie suggested that I place a lens to the sunglasses over the camera lens. Well that helped. But yet, when the 20-power zoom lens is fully extended, it makes blurred photos common. Even mounting my Nikon Coolpix on a tripod failed to steady the camera.
I felt fairly proud of having captured a recognizable image of an eclipse, the kind of which appeared 11 years ago and is scheduled to reappear in another 11. Monday morning, glancing at the Journal, I saw a series of photographs showing the different phases of the eclipse, each image crisp, almost as if it had been Photoshopped, which is a computer application that lets people “fix” lots of images.
I’m a bit envious of people who take photos for a living and whose equipment equals the value of a mansion.
We watched the eclipse from a field near our house in Camp Luna; a few neighbors, with binoculars, small telescopes and camera gathered. But that turnout was nothing like the hordes of watchers who gathered in places like Albuquerque to watch the event.
In July 1963, while working in an Illinois city called — appropriately — Aurora, I joined newspaper colleagues to photograph an eclipse. For the first time I became aware of the danger of looking directly at the sun during an eclipse.
Our newspaper had run articles instructing readers how to construct a “camera obscura” device, with a pinhole that lets viewers see the shape of the eclipse without looking directly at the sun. Instead, people had their back to the sun and watched the shapes as they the displayed on the wall of the device.
It was the same kind of device that people watching Sunday’s eclipse were encouraged to construct. Both eclipses, separated by almost 50 years, were enjoyable to watch.
One unhappy person was Charlie Brown in the “Peanuts” comic strip who complained that “Production needs to be held accountable. Why do they plan an eclipse that nobody can even watch?”
• • •
A number of people have weighed in on a possible four-day school week for East Las Vegas. Here’s my concern:
If five days of teaching are compressed into four days, that must mean that the fifth day, a Friday, six hours long, needs to be distributed among the first four days.
That means tacking an extra 90 minutes on to Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Now if the typical teacher, for example, performs five days’ work in the space of four days, he or she will have already completed a full week.
Does that mean teachers will still need — and be willing — to come in on Fridays for things like tutoring, advisement and enhancement? Will they get extra pay for doing so?
• • •
“You know what expression bothers me the most?” my friend Grover Durham asked the other day at the recreation center.
“Let me guess,” I answered.
“You know,” Durham said. And he is right. I fail to find a more useless space-filler in all of English. But around here, it’s really not “you know”; in casual discourse, you know, we say “Ya know.”