Word: shadowing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...tiny Canton Island, near the sunrise end of the shadow path, confused frigate birds came in from the sea when darkness fell. In Peru, at the sunset end, bats flitted around the fast-working scientists. Radio crews of NBC at Canton Island and of CBS in Peru were able to broadcast lyrical descriptions. The sun's corona was almost circular, a form associated with the high sunspot activity currently manifested by the sun. Exulted white-thatched Clyde Fisher of Manhattan's Hayden Planetarium : "This was the most beautiful of four totalities I have observed...
...eclipse, during which they must make their photographs and observations. It is theoretically possible for an occultation of the sun by the moon to last as long as 7 min. 30 sec., but most are several minutes shorter than that. Last year's June eclipse, for example, whose shadow path across Asia was studded with astronomers' observation camps (TIME, June 22), lasted only 2 min. 31½ sec. at maximum. There was a tragic irony about the eclipse which on Tuesday of this week passed for thousands of miles across the tropical wastes of the Pacific Ocean...
This week's eclipse touched almost no land at all. Starting in the open sea at sunrise, it darkened the tiny specks of the Phoenix Islands shortly after 8 a. m., then the shadow rolled on across the sea, stabbing into Peru just before it ended at sundown. In the Phoenix Islands totality lasted 3 min. 35 sec. In Peru, where it lasted 3 min. 24 sec., the sun was only 8° above the horizon during totality and its darkened image was distorted by late afternoon haze. Nevertheless eclipses offer such fine opportunities to scientists to study...
Total solar eclipses occur on the average about once every 18 months somewhere on earth. Any given spot should have one once every 360 years. The size of the shadow and hence the rapidity with which it passes a given point vary because, the earth's orbit around the sun and the moon's orbit around the earth being elliptical, the earth-sun and earth-moon distances vary. For a long eclipse, the sun must be near its maximum swing of over 94,000,000 miles (mean distance: 92,900,000 mi.) and the moon near its minimum...
Another factor affecting totality duration is that the shadow travels slowest at noon, fastest near the beginning and end of the eclipse day. Earth rotates eastward at about 1,040 m.p.h. at the Equator. The moon's eastward orbit carries the lunar shadow in the same direction at just about twice that speed, so that it rapidly overtakes the terrestrial rotation. At noon, when the shadow is perpendicular, the speed is 1,060 m.p.h.; earlier and later, when the cone of darkness impinges at an angle, it goes faster-depending on the acuteness of the angle...