FIG. 38.—FAC-SIMILE OF PHOTOGRAPH OF CORONA OF 1871.
(ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY’S MEMOIRS.)
The years brought round the eclipse of 1878, which was again in United States territory, the central track (as [Fig. 30] has already shown) running directly over one of the loftiest mountains of the country, Pike’s Peak, in Colorado. Pike’s Peak, though over fourteen thousand feet high, is often ascended by pleasure tourists; but it is one thing to stay there for an hour or two, and another to take up one’s abode there and get acclimated,—for to do the latter we must first pass through the horrors (not too strong a word) of mountain-sickness. This reaches its height usually on the second or third day, and is something like violent sea-sickness, complicated with the sensations a mouse may be supposed to have under the bell of an air-pump. After a week the strong begin to get over it, but none but the very robust should take its chances, as we did, without preparation; for on the night before the eclipse the life of one of our little party was pronounced in danger, and he was carried down in a litter to a cabin at an altitude of about ten thousand feet, where he recovered so speedily as to be able to do good service on the following day. The summit of the “Peak” is covered with great angular bowlders of splintered granite, among which we laid logs brought up for firewood, and on these, sacks of damp hay, then stretching a little tent over all and tying it down with wire to the rocks, we were fain to turn in under damp blankets, and to lie awake with incessant headache, drawing long, struggling breaths in the vain attempt to get air, and wondering how long the tent would last, as the canvas flapped and roared with a noise like that of a loose sail in a gale at sea, with occasional intervals of a dead silence, usually followed by a gust that shoved against the tent with the push of a solid body, and if a sleepers shoulders touched the canvas, shouldered him over in his bed. The stout canvas held, but the snow entered with the wind and lay in a deep drift on the pillow, when I woke after a brief sleep toward morning, and, looking out on the gray dawn, found that the snow had turned to hail, which was rattling sharply on the rocks with an accompaniment of thunder, which seemed to roll from all parts of the horizon. The snow lay thick, and the sheets of hail were like a wall, shutting out the sight of everything a few rods off, and this was in July! I thought of my December station in sunny Andalusia.
FIG. 39.—“SPECTRES.”
Hail, rain, sleet, snow, fog, and every form of bad weather continued for a week on the summit, while it was almost always clear below. It was often a remarkable sight to go to the edge and look down. The expanse of “the plains,” which stretched eastward to a horizon line over a hundred miles distant, would be in bright sunshine beneath, while the hail was all around and above us; and the light coming up instead of down gave singular effects when the clouds parted below, the plains seeming at such times to be opalescent with luminous yellow and green, as though the lower world were translucent, and the sun were beneath it and shining up through. [Fig. 39] is a picture of three of us on the mountain-top, who saw a rarer spectacle; for directly opposite the setting sun, and on the mist over the gulf beyond us, was a bright ring, in whose centre were three phantom images of our three selves, which moved as we moved, and then faded as the sun sank. It was “the spectre of the Brocken.” These ghostly presentments were tolerably defined, as in the sketch, but did not seem to be gigantic, as some have described them. We rather thought them close at hand; but before we could determine, the vision faded.
The clouds, to our good fortune, rolled away on the 29th; and a number of pleasure-seekers, who came up to view the eclipse and the unwonted bright sunshine, made a scene which it was hard to identify with the usual one. This time my business was to draw the corona; and the extreme altitude and the clearness of the air, with perhaps some greater extension than usual in the object itself, enabled it to be followed to an unprecedented distance. During totality the sun was surrounded by a narrow ring—hardly more than a line—of vivid light, presenting no structure to the naked eye (but a remarkable one in the telescope); and this faded with great suddenness into a circular nebulous luminosity between two and three diameters of the sun wide, but without such marked plumes, or filaments, as I had seen in 1869. The most extraordinary thing, however, was a beam of light, inclined at an angle of about forty-five degrees, about as wide as the sun, and extending to the distance of nearly six of its diameters on one side and over twelve on the other; on one side alone, that is, to the amazing distance of over ten million miles from its body. Substantially the same observation was made, as it appeared later, by Professor Newcomb, at a lower level. The direction, when more carefully measured, it was interesting to note, coincided closely with that of the Zodiacal light, and a faint central rib added to its resemblance to that body. It is noteworthy, in illustration of what has already been said as to the conflict of ocular testimony, that though I, with the great majority of observers below, saw only this beam, two witnesses whose evidence is unimpeachable, Professors Young and Abbe, saw a pale beam at right angles to it; and that one observer did not see the beam in question at all. [Fig. 40] is a sketch made from my own, but necessarily on a scale which can show only its general features.
With the telescope, the whole of the bright inner light close to the sun was found to be made up of filaments, more definite even than those described in a previous chapter as seen in sun-spots, and bristling in all directions from the edge; not concealing each other, as we might expect such things to do, upon a sphere, but fringing the sun’s edge in definite outline, as though it were really but a disk.
FIG. 40.—OUTER CORONA OF 1878. (U. S. NAVAL OBSERVATORY.)