Thirty Years of Chasing Eclipses

摘要

The first one in 19-79, was a bit of a surprise: I didn't so much as go to it, as it came to me. I had expected to go, because Oppolzer's Canon predicted that it would pass to the west of Winnipeg, near the Saskatchewan border, but by the time it was three years out, more recent calculations showed that it would pass over Winnipeg. And, it did.rnIt also passed over the Winnipeg School Board. In the weeks leading up to the eclipse, the Board engaged in a ill-informed dispute with the astronomy community about safely viewing the Sun. Local optometrists, just as ignorant as the school authorities, jumped into the fray in the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press, coming down on the side of "the only safe eclipse is one viewed on television." We must have had some impact however, as the schools in Winnipeg had their greatest-ever absentee rate - over 30 percent of students played hooky. To this day, I hear stories of how "Mom and Dad stayed home that day to show me the eclipse."