First photograph of a solar eclipse July 18, 1851. From the Wikipediacommons and in the public domain.

Some of you are going to have the priveledge today of seeing a partial solar eclipse.  Unfortunately, those of us in New England have to be happy with the fall foliage this time.  The fall foliage is BTW being ripped from the trees by a violent noreaster – another New England phenomenon. This got me wondering the proverbial question, who was the first person to photograph a solar eclipse.  The honor appears, according to the Wikipedia, to go to daguerreotypist Berkowski who took the photograph of Figure 1 on July 28, 1851 at the Royal Observatory in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kalinigrad in Russia).

Now, I say appears because the Wikipedia entry for Berkowski contains the cryptic phrase “the first correctly exposed photograph of the solar corona,” suggesting that someone else tried first. A small 6 cm refracting telescope was attached to the 15.8 cm Fraunhofer heliometer and an 84-second exposure was taken shortly after the beginning of totality.

The problem with solar eclipses being that you don’t get retakes. I photographed one back in 1971.  It was amazing and what I remember is all the preparation and then nonstop shooting.  You have this desire to just look and say wow!

Solar eclipse are not however, mere curiosities.  The eclipse of 1919 was famous for the demonstration that light paths are bent in a gravitational field, in this case that of the Sun.  See Figure 2. This was a demonstration of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

Figure 1 – From the report of Sir Arthur Eddington on the expedition to the island of Principe (off the west coast of Africa) – demonstrating the bending of light in a gravitational field. From the Wikipediacommons and in the public domain.