My enjoyment of looking up into the night sky began when I was six years old. It was in the early 1950s and my family lived in Newport, Rhode Island. On any clear night you could look up and see the Milky Way spread across the sky. My Dad taught us the names of the stars and the constellations. Most every summer night my brother and I would go outside and look up at the stars. We would tell each other tales of maybe someday getting to them.
During these halcyon days a solar eclipse was due. It was going to be a partial eclipse. From what my Dad told us I was very excited. But my Dad warned me not to look directly at the sun. He told me that it would ruin my eyes.
There were no special sun glasses to wear back then. I think my Dad just knew that we needed to protect our eyes. Perhaps we also heard it on the radio. (We did not have a TV back then. Not many people did.) Public wisdom was to use a stack of film negatives (who has those now?) or to use a candle to smoke a small pane of glass. (the 1950s were a more inventive, but less safe time).
I remember going out into the back yard with a stack of negatives and a piece of glass I had smoked with a candle flame. I remember looking through them both, but the sun was so bright that I had to turn my gaze away. I saw nothing of a solar eclipse, partial or otherwise.
The next partial eclipse I remember trying to observe was in the 1960s. At that time we lived in Morocco. I was 14 years old, but technology had not advanced for me. I was still trying to view the eclipse with negatives and smoked glass. Plus, a friend of mine had an old welder’s mask and we tried that too. We climbed up on the home oil tank and from there climbed over the parapet onto the flat roof of my house. I had already found my way to the roof when I installed a wire antenna for my radio kit.
I will say that the 1960s were not much safer than the 1950s.
I had bought a Newtonian telescope from Sears in the 1980s. I used it to get a better look at the moon and the planets and occasionally a comet. I made a portable, helio-viewer that I could mount over my Newtonian telescope to view sunspots, eclipses, and transits. With this set up I could take pictures of the projection of the sun on the screen I constructed.
The eclipses I have seen in the 2000s have been with better equipment and not viewed from roof tops.
But for April 2024 eclipse I decided to enjoy it without my viewer and screen. I would just look up at it with my new Eclipse viewing glasses. The ones I have are made by Celestron, and I have great faith in them. I sat on one of the patio rocking chairs, put on my special glasses, and looked right up at the sun.
And I could see it without a stack of negatives, or a piece of smoked glass, or a welder’s mask. I could watch the sun being eclipsed while looking right at it.
As I sat in my rocking chair I could hear my father’s voice, “Son, don’t look directly at it.” – and I would turn my head away for a while.
Me – at last – directly viewing a solar eclipse (thanks to my fantastic Eclipse viewing glasses).
A friend of mine, Dave, was kind enough to send me the lead picture in this post. The picture of the April 2024 Solar Eclipse was taken through his telescope. It was shot from his home outside Chicago. Thank you, Dave for sending it to me.