Today, Dan and I drove out into the Québec countryside to chase the solar eclipse. Our original plan was to go to Mansonville, which was near the centre of the zone of totality. Unexpected delays, however, made us late leaving home, and in the end, we watched the eclipse from Lacolle, at a gravel-lined area for cars to turn around near the U.S. border, at approximately 45°00’45.2″N 73°23’57.7″W (45.01267, -73.39933). At this location, the total eclipse lasted from 15:25 to 15:29, for a total duration of 3 minutes and 23.8 seconds. As it turned out, this was an excellent place to experience the eclipse.
We did not look at the sun through eclipse glasses. I didn’t want to take even a small risk of damaging my eyes, and, in any case, I was not interested in looking at the sun. I wanted to observe the landscape. I had walked outdoors during a partial solar eclipse on a sunny day years earlier and looked at the dappled light under a tree, all the normally oval splotches of light crescent-shaped. I knew that a partial eclipse felt like an overcast day, and I wanted to see whether a total eclipse would also be like an overcast day, or whether it would be more like a moonless night. I wanted to have an idea of what people experienced in the days before eclipses were understood, when people believed that the sun revolved around the earth, and that natural phenomena like eclipses were messages from angry gods.
The partial eclipse started around 14:15 and lasted until around 16:30. For most of this time, we were driving. Since eyes register light intensity in a logarithmic way, it is difficult to distinguish between very bright light and slightly less bright light. The early moments of the partial eclipse, therefore, were not noticeably different. But as we kept driving, the nature of the light changed in subtle ways. As Dan commented, it was eerie that the light was subdued despite the sharp shadows cast by trees and buildings. (On an overcast day, one would not expect to see sharply delineated shadows. Although the sun was not blocked by clouds where we were, there were clouds elsewhere in the sky, which made one think that the sun was behind clouds. The eeriness would have been more pronounced on a cloudless day.) I observed that the landscape around us looked reminiscent of the early landscapes (an excellent selection of which can be seen at National Gallery in Washington, D.C.) painted before the invention of modern pigments. Back then, artists were forced to use a limited palette consisting mainly of white, black, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, and ultramarine blue (or various other pigments similar to these).1 They did not have cadmium yellow light, which almost magically reproduces direct sunlight and, when mixed with blue, bright green foliage lit by the sun. For hours, I felt like we were driving through an endless series of old landscape paintings. It was beautiful.
Part of the reason the landscape appeared to be painted with a limited palette of traditional pigments was that it is still early spring in Ontario, and the bare trees are the colour of raw umber and burnt sienna, while the fields lining the road are still a light yellow ochre. The reduced luminosity of direct sunlight made everything look like a painting, which is always, inevitably and frustratingly, less luminous than reality (as it is made up of reflected light as opposed to, say, the sky, which is made up of scattered light). But on our way home after the eclipse, looking again at the landscape in partially eclipsed sunlight, I realized that the landscape was not just less brightly lit but also more intensely yellow than one would expect. The yellow vegetation along the side of the road, as well as the yellow fields, looked significantly yellower than they should have been. I believe the reason for this is that the dimming of the sunlight made me expect to see the bluish colours of an overcast day. Instead, there was direct sunlight, which is yellow.2
The total eclipse was amazing. As the time approached 15:25, it got dark very quickly — much, much more quickly than any sunset. It continued to get darker, and darker, until the sky above turned navy. I looked over at the border crossing, and I was taken aback to see that, with its artificial lights, and the headlights of a stopped car, it looked like a border crossing at night. The eclipse was significantly darker than an overcast day or dusk. It was, in other words, the darkness of night. The only thing that made it different from nighttime was that the horizon was glowing orange-red with the light from surrounding areas that were not experiencing a total eclipse at that moment.
As the total eclipse ended, with the light increasing much more quickly than any dawn, birds started chirping. Did they think it was a new day? Were they upset by the sudden sunset and nightfall, and relieved to have the sun return? Or do they sing to announce that the sun has just come up, not necessarily that it is morning? One part of the sky, over areas that were still in total eclipse, was a darker blue, and then, within a few seconds, it, too, became light.
I feel sympathy for the people who experienced a total solar eclipse before it was understood as such. I wonder how many of them looked at the sun directly, fascinated and frightened by what was going on, and lost their sight as a result. I wonder if word got around that looking at an eclipsed sun was a bad idea, or whether the rarity of a total eclipse made it difficult to warn others across time and large distances.
I read later that many schools decided to close in order to avoid taking on the risk of having students look at the sun directly during the eclipse and damage their vision. One person, a scientist, commented that this was unkind to kids whose parents were not in a position to take them out to see the eclipse. I agree, and I think it’s unfortunate that those schools focused on avoiding responsibility rather than on giving all their students an equal opportunity to experience this awe-inspiring phonemonon. Viewing an eclipse does not have to mean looking at the sun through eclipse glasses. One can always watch that online or on TV. A school can easily protect its students by putting them in a classroom with its windows facing away from the sun, and have the students safely observe the outside landscape and the sky.
I, for one, am grateful for having had this incredible experience.
- I, too, used a limited palette of traditional pigments for a while after returning to painting. This is a very good exercise for an artist. It teaches one to use colours efficiently, and it gives one an appreciation for the power of modern pigments. On a recent visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., I saw two paintings that Claude Monet painted with such a palette. It is fascinating to look at those paintings. In many ways they are like many other Monet paintings, but the subdued colours make them fundamentally different. They are not what anyone would conjure up as a painting by Monet. ↩︎
- Direct sunlight is somewhat yellow. (As much as a scientist may say that sunlight is made up of all the colours of light and is therefore white, as an artist I have found that if I want to paint direct
sunlight on a surface, I need to tint the colour, whatever it is, with a hint of cadmium yellow light.) The sky is blue because sunlight is Rayleigh-scattered off the air molecules, and this scattering is much more likely in the higher frequencies (in the blues) than in the lower frequencies (in the reds). Thus, more blue light than red scatters back from the air into our eyes, making the sky look blue. A sunset is red because the sun is low in the sky, and as the light from it traverses the large thickness of atmosphere, the blue frequencies of light get scattered away, allowing more of the red frequencies to reach our eye. Clouds are white because the scattering of light off a water molecule is equal over the range of frequencies of light. On an overcast day, the light is bluer than it is yellow because the direct sunlight is blocked by clouds, and the indirect light is the bluer light scattered from the air molecules in the atmosphere. ↩︎