FOR TWO MINUTES

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 February 1936, Page 11

FOR TWO MINUTES

ASTRONOMERS’ JOURNEY. I Six men from Georgetown University and the National Geographic Society will travel half-way around the world to Soviet Russia to view the two and a-half minute total eclipse of the sun on June 19, 1936, it was announced at Washington, says the “Christian Science Monitor.” “Even so brief an observation of the sun is considered well worth while by astronomers because it gives them a rare opportunity to study the sun’s corona —a halo of pearly light extending hundreds of thousands of miles outward from the sun but visible only during an eclipse when the rest of the sun’s light is cut off,” the Geographic Society explained. Headquarters of the expedition will be established near Orenburg, probabljr at the village of Sara, near the line along which the centre of the moon’s shadow will travel during the eclipse. Orenburg is about 775 miles south-west of Moscow. The expedition, to be headed by Dr. Paul A. McNally, director of the Georgetown College Observatory, will leave some time in April and return in July. “Photographs taken during the eclipse, timed with great exactness, will give astronomers a chance to ‘hold a stop-watch’ on the movements of the solar system and see if it is ‘running on schedule,’ ’’the Geographic Society says. Movements of the sun, moon, and planets in relation to one another are predicted with extreme accuracy by astronomers, but the predictions can be checked only when two heavenly bodies pass each other. This eclipse, the first total eclipse o'’ the sun to be visible on earth since that of February, 1934, will to be visible at sunrise in the Mediterranean Sea off the south-western coast of the Grecian Peleponnesus. The moon’s shadow, marking a path of totality about fifty miles wide, will sweep in a. direction north of east across the Agean Sea, Istanbul, and tho Black Sea, will pass south of Rostov and Stalingrad, across Orenburg, and over Omsk and Tomsk in Siberia. The Governments ■ of both Soviet Russia, and Japan have extended invitations to the scientific organisations of the world to send expeditions to their territories for observation of the eclipse.