Images jutoh floating1/3/2024 ![]() I believe we stopped at a beach just north of Boston, where I touched the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. We crossed the Gaspe Peninsula, bored our way south across New Brunswick, and then drove the entire length of Maine. I was so annoyed by missing totality that my memories of the trip back are sparser than those of the trip out. We went home by another way, to borrow from an excellent James Taylor song of the same name. Once totality was over, we sat around and moped. And we saw a strange thing as totality happened: The undersides of the clouds got very dark. This time, totality was the whole point of the adventure.īy 45 minutes before totality, the sky had almost completely clouded over. We had, however, already seen a partial solar eclipse, right at home in Chicago on March 7, 1970, when we were still high schoolers. As minutes passed, the bite out of the Sun’s disk grew larger and larger.īut then–damn!– clouds began to roll in from the west. After that, we simply sat around and waited. We tinkered and aligned and adjusted and got everything ready to rock. The telescopes had been set up the day before. The morning of Monday, July 10 dawned bright and clear. So the ones you see here will be the ones I could pry out of the album. ![]() (How quickly we have forgotten the Age of Film…) I also have to admit that most of them will not let go of the sticky pages of the photo album they’ve lived in for the last thirty or forty years. I boggle that I have as few photos of the adventure as I do, and how crude those photos are. The landscape was rolling hills and pine forest, and down a gnarly slope, the St. There was lots of room, good facilities, and gorgeous summer weather. The final leg took us to a campground in Cap Chat, Quebec, where we had reserved a few campsites. We camped, we cooked, we slept, and the next morning we roared off again, this time to (I think) somewhere near Quebec City. I was nervous about passing through Canadian customs with a huge aluminum tube strapped to the top of the Rambler, but the officer had evidently seen a fair number of telescopes heading east already, and grinned as he waved us through. On our first day on the road, we made it to the outskirts of Toronto. ![]() The names of the other three I’ve simply forgotten. One was Ellen, a girl Art and I knew from our church. One was my best friend Art, whom I’d known since kindergarten. That name was… peculiarly…appropriate, as I’ll describe a little later.įive of us had belonged to the Lane Tech Amateur Astronomical Society as high schoolers. ![]() Houston, well, I’m pretty sure it was because of that evergreen catchphrase: “Houston, we have a problem.” I believe Gaspain was a play on Gaspe, the name of the peninsula that the Sun’s umbra would cross a few days later. So it was Sundog, Houston, Gaspain and…I forget my friend George’s CB handle. I had discovered CB radio earlier that year, and persuaded my convoy colleagues to equip their cars with radios and antennas. I doubt I could have pulled it off had it happened today.īut happen it did: Four cars carrying ten hapless amateur astronomers and a lot of handmade gear got underway before the crack of dawn on (I think) July 7. We’ve become a lot more cautious as a culture since then. I prevailed upon my parents to do a temporary car swap: my 1968 Chevelle for my father’s 1970 Rambler station wagon. I had a car, but it was a 2-door sedan that didn’t lend itself to lugging my ginormous telescope anywhere. We called it Project Moonshadow, under the influence of the well-known Cat Stevens song of the same name and era. (Ham radio was another year off.) I don’t remember at all who in my inner circles originally had the idea, but as ideas go, it was huge: We would all convoy 1200 miles around the south end of Lake Michigan, across the State of Michigan, and then across a great deal of Canada, to reach the path of totality, which was damned near at the mouth of the St. Although I tinkered with electronics now and then, my primary passion (apart from Carol) was astronomy. Fifty years ago today, I didn’t see my first total solar eclipse.
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