The solar eclipse - Professional advice for the 'amateurs'
Find out more about the Eye Museum's fascinating collection of eclipse memorabilia.
Find out more about the Eye Museum's fascinating collection of eclipse memorabilia.
Author: Neil Handley, Museum Curator
Date: 18 March 2015
In all the eager anticipation for the solar eclipse I am reminded of the last such event in 1999. We collected various commercial and prototype ‘solar viewers’ for the museum and you can see them on our website here. On the day itself, College staff went out into Trafalgar Square and the pigeons (who hadn’t yet been evicted by Mayor Ken Livingstone) were both visibly and audibly confused when day turned apparently to night.
We still await the weather report to know if we’ll witness something similar this time around. In an attempt to perform some last minute education on the assembled crowd that August day we took one of our antique prints out to show them. It’s a 19th century lithograph by the Van Lier Brothers, originally published in the Album Charivarique, entitled Caricatures du Jour - Les Amateurs D'Eclipse. If you love eclipses too then this print is for you. It shows both what you should and shouldn’t do.
First of all I love the fact that one person has climbed on the shoulders of a circus performer, himself standing on a stool, to get as it were, closer to the action. It’s nearly 93 million miles to the sun so the extra five or six feet won’t make much difference. Of course, this person ought not to be viewing the eclipse directly at all, still less through a telescope with its serious risk of retinal burn. The man on the left has a serious piece of astronomical kit, a multi-draw telescope that might just about channel the sun’s rays into a lethal weapon. Another man stares only slightly less dangerously through a glass bottle, perhaps wrongly assuming its tinted glass will filter away the harm. The dogs have been tethered as a precaution, but it might have been better if they had been shut away altogether indoors. It turns out these are potential guide dogs: the French-language sign translates as ‘Poodles to rent, for getting around in the darkness’. Now there’s an entrepreneurial idea!
Despair turns to relative joy however when we witness an indirect method of viewing the eclipse in the bottom right. Someone is tracking the passage of sun and moon via the reflection in a pail of water. As the main caption reads ‘Astronomy is a bit tiring’, presumably the words of the circus pierrot, but it could so easily be blinding so the College urges you to take care this Friday.