LAST JULY OMNI JOINED A FLOTILLA OF SUN WORSHIPPERS ON A VOYAGE INTO THE
TWILIGHT ZONE

CRUISING THE ECLIPSE

7:27 A.M., July 7, 1991. We're ninety-six hours from the eclipse, but some of
the dedicated eclipse tans are already out on the starboard railings of the S.S.
Independence, squinting anxiously at the sun. It's good and bright, right this
minute. That's pretty much the way you'd expect the sun to be here in these
sunny Hawaiian waters, and the good news is that if the moon were going to slide
in front of it today instead of four days from now you'd surely say that it was
being eclipsed, all right. The bad news is that you wouldn't be able to make
out some of the fainter outer corona because there's a thin, high fan of cirrus
that starts at the horizon and spreads out over the eastern sky. It won't keep
you from getting a sunburn, but it's just enough to fuzz out the fainter patches
of coronal light. Maybe our luck will be better on July 11.

Maybe it won't, too. Pacific skies are cloudy. I've flown over this ocean
twice in the last few weeks, fourteen and a half hours from San Francisco to
Hong Kong, and there was never a minute when I could look out my window and see
no clouds in the sky at all. This morning there are fluffy little clumps of
cumulus all over the eastern horizon. Twenty minutes later, while we're eating
our breakfast papaya and omelets on the fantail, a couple of clumps slide right
over the sun, and that's the kind of thing that can really spoil an eclipse for
you.

Of course, on the Independence we'll be a moving target. We should be able to
dodge a few cumulus shadows. We'd better do it, too. There are 800 passengers
who have booked passage on the Independence for the sole and simple reason that
they want to see the sun go out. If they don't see it with their own eyes some
of them are going to be thirsting for blood.

Eight hundred on the Independence, 800 more on its sister ship, the
Constitution, heaven knows how many others aiming to be out at sea somewhere in
Hawaiian waters, on anything from a kayak to a catamaran, so they can get a good
look at the Nineties' best eclipse.

The great thing about the July 11, 1991, eclipse isn't just that it's a good
long one (more than four minutes of totality right here; some other eclipses
give you only seconds) but that its path sweeps right over a lot of places where
people like to go anyway. Once it leaves the Big Island its next stop on land
is the tourist havens along the Mexican coast; so Baja California is standing
room only, too. Other eclipses have been in far less desirable (or, for that
matter, accessible) places. The sun and moon don't consult human wishes when
they meet. The moon's shadow can strike the earth anywhere on its sunlit (or,
of course, temporarily nonsunlit) face from the North Pole to Antarctica, and it
has a distressing habit of doing so in the middle of an ocean, jungle, or
iberian wasteland; when scientists wanted to check out Albert Einstein's
relativity predictions by observing the May 29, 1919, eclipse they had to go to
an island in Africa's Gulf of Guinea to do it.

Still, some of our shipmates n the Independence might do e same thing. Some of
them have seen three, five, as many as a dozen total eclipses in one part of the
world or another, anywhere from New York's Central Park (that was way back in
1925; I saw ost of that one myself) to the na Sea, and they all want more. They
come in all shapes and sizes, our shipmates do. Over the week we're at sea I
meet an Army chaplain, an advertising executive, a bundle of teachers at all
levels, retired senior citizens from assorted walks of life, and-unusual for a
cruise ship, but not really unexpected for this one-a great many working
scientists: astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, chemists,
computer people, and one or two who don't exactly say what it is they're working
on, but whose home base is one or another research facility of the Department of
Defense.

Then there are the kids. There are dozens of them. We happen to have lunch one
day with a bright, well-mannered seven-year-old named Michael, traveling with
his grandparents and doing his best to be good company ... but clearly yearning
to get it over with so he can get back to his Nintendo. The adults have other
entertainment: movies, hula lessons, cards, contests, cabaret shows, and
"us"-astronaut Michael Collins, photographer George Keene, meteorologist Joe
Rao, and generalist (which is to say, science-fiction writer) me. This will be
Keene's eleventh eclipse, and he has spectacular photographs of the last five to
prove it. Joe Rao is the weatherman who will try to pick out the clearest piece
of ocean for us on the morning of the eleventh, besides which he has seen and
photographed several eclipses himself, while Mike Collins, on his way around the
moon on Apollo 11 in 1969, saw all the personal eclipses a person might want. I
am low man on this particular totem pole. All I have is the memory of that
ancient 1925 event-and now Joe Rao breaks the news to me that I was several
miles too far south and east at the time to see real totality, so that all I
actually got was about a 99.99 percent partial. I never knew that. I was five
years old. All I knew was that the sun went out.

We sail after sunset. When it's full dark and we're well away from the light
pollution of Honolulu and Waikiki, Joe Rao takes a bunch of us out on deck to
look at the constellations. Captain L. Richard Haugh has turned off all the
lights the rules of the sea will allow, and the seeing is good.

This is a good place to see the southern constellations, and these are good
ships for the purpose. Especially if you want to take pictures. They were
originally built as Atlantic liners, with glamorous histories, until the
Hawaiian-American Line rebuilt them to cruise the islands. They're steady
photographic platforms because their propulsion is gentle steam rather than the
sometimes jittery diesel motors.

7:28 A.M., July 8. We're tied up at the port of Nawiliwili, Kauai, and if the
eclipse were this morning we'd be in pretty good shape. The high cirrus veil is
gone, and although there are some hefty cumuli around, we shouldn't have much
trouble dodging them.

There's one unwelcome development. The trade winds blow steadily from the east
at these latitudes, but for the last few days they've been taking some time off.
Now, in the absence of the trades, dust from the erupting volcano in the
Philippines has backtracked to our air. Besides burying Clark Field, Mount
Pinatubo is making a faint, almost invisible, silvery sheen over the sky. Its
dust has made some gorgeous sunsets, but sunsets we can get almost any day, and
it's for the best possible view of the total eclipse that we've collectively
traveled all these miles,

Mauna Loa isn't the Big Island's only towering mountain. The other is Mauna Kea,
just a trifle taller and crowned with astronomical observatories.

That's one of the other graces of this July 1991 eclipse: Its path of totality
goes smack over one of the world's largest aggregations of big telescopes, on
the peak of Mauna Kea. The reason so many institutions have put their biggest
instruments there isn't because the astronomers like sunbathing on the
beaches-actually, much of the programming for the telescopes is done by remote
control from as far away as the Greenwich Observatory in Englandbut because the
seeing is so good. At two and a half miles up, the mirrors are placed well
above much of the earth's air and most of its obscuring water vapor-most of the
time.

Still, I know from personal experience that even up there the seeing sometimes
goes sour. I'm an observatories fan-everything from the Big Eye on Mount
Palomar to the Bigger Dish of the radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico-and
once when I was staying in Hilo I couldn't resist the temptation to take a look.
Against advice I rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle and made the climb. The
advice had been good. It wasn't a fun drive: narrow road snaking up the
mountain, high winds that made the Jeepster slither back and forth on the loose
gravel, with 500-foot drops and no guardrails, and a freezing, sleety tempest at
the top. There wasn't going to be any seeing that day. Not even sight-seeing;
I turned right around and headed back down-and was lucky, I guess, because the
next day the road washed out in the storm and a party of astronomers was stuck
on the mountain for three days.

And they're not doing much better now. The peak of Mauna Kea has been socked in
for three days, and the solar astronomers are biting their nails. They really
want to get this one in. It's not their only chance, quite. Sooner or later
there will be another total eclipse passing over their heads, but, on average,
they come back to the same place only once every 350 years.

The Mauna Kea astronomers don't really need a total eclipse to study, for
instance, the sun's corona. They do it all year round. They make their own
eclipses, when they want them, by sliding a sun-sized opaque disc into the
optics of their telescopes, and with the bright solar disc hidden the corona
pops right out. But then sunglow lights the air around the image, and besides,
the chance of comparing the natural eclipse with the coronagraph studies lets
them check their simulation, and anyway they certainly want to see it. They've
been setting up for this once-inseveral-lifetimes photo opportunity on Mauna Kea
for a long time, and the clouds that are now hovering around the top of the
mountain have never been more unwelcome.

On deck a passenger asks me if we're going to see Baily's Beads. I couldn't be
more pleased, because I happen to know the answer to that one: "No."

Baily's Beads are the little necklace of bright points of light that you
sometimes see around the eclipsed sun at totality. They come from the mountains
on the rim of the moon; at an exact matchup the valleys between them let light
from the sun's rim through.

But we won't see them this trip, because on this eclipse the moon is a tad too
large; it will overlap the disc of the sun and thus cut off not only Baily's
Beads but a little of the inner corona, and the reasons for that are that the
moon happens to be about as close to us (at 222,380 miles) as it ever gets, and
also simply that it's July.

The season of the year matters. The earth's orbit around the sun isn't a
perfect circle; it's stretched out a little to become an ellipse, and the sun
isn't exactly at the center of it. What makes things nice for the Northern
Hemisphere is that when it's our winter we're at the part of the orbit that's
closer to the sun, and now in July we're the farthest from it-94,552,000 miles
or so instead of the average distance of around 93,000,000. This makes our
Northern seasons a little milder than those south of the equator, but it also
makes the sun relatively a little smaller for this summer eclipse. Thus there
will be the moon's overlapand no beads.

Carried away with this success, I go on to demonstrate some eclipse-viewing
techniques. The ship's owners have passed out cards containing patches of
totally exposed photographic film to look through, which is one first-rate way
to do it. The patches are about as nearly totally opaque as you can get-if you
hold them over a light bulb, the bulb is invisible-but through them the sun is
nicely visible, looking like a tiny orange hanging in space.

There are other ways of seeing the sun without risking your optic nerve, too,
and I demonstrate some of them to my rapidly growing audience, which sometimes
gets up to as many as four. I show them how to make a pinhole in a stiff sheet
of paper and hold it over a white surface; the pinhole becomes a lens and the
image on the surface is a perfect tiny replica of the sun. A larger image can
be made by using binoculars or a small telescope-not looking through it, of
course, because that's a rapid way to achieve blindness, but letting the light
from the eyepiece fall on a surface. Or you can simply use a mirror to reflect
an image on a wall.

It's worth looking at even before the eclipse, because this is an active period
for the sun just now-many flares, many sunspots. With the naked eye I can't see
any sunspots on any of our images, but through a 30-power telescope I find two
big ones close together and a speckling of tinier ones, like grains of black
pepper on a melon. With all this activity there should be some fine flares to
see at totality.

At night George Keene gives a slide talk on the planets of the solar system and
some of the more glamorous other telescopic objects. The cruise director has
scheduled the talk for the ship's 125-seat theater, yet there are 200 or 300
other passengers milling around who want to get in and can't.

The thing is, the people on the Independence are not your usual passengers. Some
of them are normal enough to just want the usual sea, sun, and shopping, and for
them the eclipse is just a nice little added attraction, but the overwhelming
majority are a different breed. They are among those lucky few who have
discovered what a grand spectator sport science is. I understand them well, for
I am of their blood. Like them, I try to chase science wherever I go, from
marveling at fossils captured in the polished marble lobby of a Manhattan
skyscraper to 2,200-year-old irrigation projects in China. I have found people
like these among the geysers of Iceland and in Africa's Rift Valley. Certainly
they're going to want to attend the lectures. Even if it means missing the
ukulele lessons.

7:28 A.M., July 9. We steamed all night, and this morning we're anchored off the
Kona coast of the Big Island. If the eclipse were right now we might squeak
by-the sun's there, all right, but it isn't perfect. It's dimmed by some clouds
over the mountain.

Of course, on the eleventh we won't be this close to any mountains. We'll be
anything up to 50 miles offshore, but when I look off to where we'll be on the
western horizon what I see is a pretty discouragingly thick cloud bank.
Forty-eight hours from now that one will be long gone . . . but what will take
its place? We're not that far from the Intertropical Convergence Zone-the
latitudes that sailing-ship masters used to call the doldrums-which is the place
where the light and fickle winds go in all directions and can pop up a
disturbance on short notice. So weather forecasting in these latitudes is
tricky, and the captain pores over the meteorological reports with Joe Rao.

In their talks Keene and Rao are covering the skies and the weather, so when I
do my first lecture I talk about the geology of the Hawaiian islands. They're
definitely volcanic, but they're also situated a long way from the "ring of
fire" around the Pacific Ocean, where colliding tectonic plates produce Mexico's
Paricutin and Washington State's Mount St. Helens and all the others, up through
Alaska and down through Kamchatka and Japan. Hawaii sits right in the middle of
the biggest tectonic plate of all, where you don't expect volcanoes to be. Yet
the islands are nothing but a long string of volcanoes, the newest one, the Big
Island, to the south and east of the island arc; the others growing older as
they stretch off to the north and west, past Kauai, as far as the eroded surface
atolis and underwater seamounts that end the chain.

What made them? A "hot spot," a place under the solid Pacific plate where the
magma was a little hotter and more buoyant than the stuff around it, and so it
pushed its way up through the rock to make a volcano. As that volcano grew, it
became an island. But then the Pacific plate, slowly moving northeast, pulled
that first volcano away from the hot spot, and another began in its place. And
so on while the older ones, their renewing lava flows having dried up, began to
be slowly eroded by the wind, rain, and waves.

The Independence is going to spend most of the day in the port of Hilo on the
Big Island of Hawaii. The newest island, it still has the active volcanoes of
Mauna Loa and Kilauea. I urge all the science chasers in the audience to take
the 40-minute drive up to spectacular Volcanoes National Park so they can see
the craters.

The other lecturers have been talking about the exploration of
space-particularly Mike Collins, who has been there. Curiously, there's a
connection between the lava tubes of Hawaii and the prospects for lunar
colonization-maybe. A lava tube is formed when the lava spilling out of an
overflowing crater or vent rolls down a hill; the lava moves in the form of
fingers, like chocolate syrup dripping down the sides of a sundae, and the outer
surface of each finger begins to cool almost at once. After a while the outer
surface hardens, forming a sort of pipe that contains the molten rock pouring
through its interior. When the source pool of lava dries up, the lava inside
spills out. The hollow tube remains, though it is covered by later flows.

The moon once had volcanoes, too, and they probably produced their own lava
tubes. If so, they're probably still there and reasonably intact-there's not
much erosion on the surface of the moon to break them up as it would on
Earth-and because of the light lunar gravity they're probably much bigger than
Kilauea's, as much as 1,000 feet in diameter and miles long.

So there's a bit of good luck for any future lunar colonists. They probably
would be looking for a safe place to live underground, away from the danger of
radiation from solar flares. If they could find a convenient lava tube they
could save a lot of excavation: dig down to the tube, slap a coat of sealant on
the walls, fill it with air (probably imported from Earth).

All that, of course, contains several maybes-of which the biggest is that,
maybe, we will sooner or later go back to the moon, this time to stay.

Around midnight we all get an unadvertised bonus, namely a chance to see some
serious volcanism in action.

We don't have to chase this science very far. All we have to do is look over
the rail, because the Independence is rounding the southern shores of the Big
Island, and that's where Madam Pele has been spilling her lava into the sea for
the last few years. Villages have been buried, tropical forests set afire, and
still the flow oozes down.

From the ship the first thing we see is a spattering of ruddy lights along the
slope of the mountain. At a distance they look like the campfires. They
aren't. They're what volcanologists call "skylights." As the lava tubes cocoon
their red-hot contents on their way downhill, the tubes sometimes crack and
bright sludge peeps out. And then, when they reach the beaches and the surf,
the streams explode into clouds of steam, brightly lit from the fiery lava,
shooting off rockets of red-hot rock in all directions. You can see this
fountaining firework display 20 miles away. There are three of these steam
infernos working now, and as we get closer we can hear them, too: hissing and
spattering, occasionally a distant gunshot sound. In a lifetime that has given
me chances of close-up inspections of a number of volcanoes, I have never seen
anything like it.

That's not quite all. There's another marvel nearby, though we can't actually
see it.

That one is the next Hawaiian island, already growing under the surface of the
sea; it is nine miles offshore, or just about under our keel at one point, and
no more than 5,000 feet away-but unfortunately, those 5,000 feet are all water,
straight down. Its name is Loihi. It will be a while before this young
volcano's lava flows lift it above the surface, but then Loihi will be another
island, and Hawaiians of that date will have to add a ninth bar to their state
flag-about a million years from now.

7:28 A.M., July 10. Sun up, sun glorious; if the eclipse were today instead of
tomorrow we'd have it in the bank.

Half an hour later, though, it's not so glorious. The clouds move in, a drizzle
starts, before long it's pelting rain and if there's a sun in the sky there is
no way for anyone on this ship to find it. But hey, what did you expect? We're
docked in the harbor of Hilo.

Hilo is sited on the wet eastern side of the Hawaiian mountains, where the trade
winds get lifted up and cooled off, causing them to drop out all their
accumulated burden of moisture before going on to the (usually) dry Kona coast
on the west. What that moisture does is fall as rain on the umbrellas of the
people of Hilo-200 inches of it in an average year. It makes for wondrously
lush tropical forests and gardens-but don't forget that umbrella.

At midnight we're under weigh to the off shore point where we hope to see the
sun go out, and Joe Rao is pacing the deck. We're already a long way from Hilo,
but the clouds have followed us. The best he can count is three stars, and
those only for minutes at a time. It's worry time on the Independence. He
spent an hour at the weather station at Lyman Field in Hilo, and the best the
maps and the forecasters could offer was a fingers-crossed "maybe."

But there's nothing to be done about it now, and we all go to bed-for five or
six hours, max.

7:28 A.M., July 11. This is it ... and we lucked out! It's gorgeous, it's
happening, and it's clearly in sight!

We're at latitude 19' 30' 42" North and longitude 156' 32' 54" West, 33 and a
bit miles off the Kona coast. Clouds are all around us. The Intertropical
Convergence Zone has done its number around us, and high cirrus and
cirrostratus, mixed with Philippine volcano dust, are coming at us from one
direction, while low, thick island clouds are heading toward us from another.
But we're in the clear! There's a doughnut of clouds above, but the captain has
put us in the hole of the doughnut, and we can clearly see the sun catch up with
the moon and touch.

When the first tiny bite appears at the top of the sun there's a cheer from all
concerned. The bite gets bigger . . . and bigger . . . and then, pow!, at
7:29:30 the bright disc of the sun is gone and the streamers of the corona leap
out at us.

We have totality.

There's another cheer at that, of course. That's what this trip is all about,
and it's worth everything it cost. At the top of the sun there's a spot of
ruby-laser light, where one immense red prominence ten times the size of the
earth has leaped out and coiled back on itself to fall back to the sun's
surface. A bit later another bright prominence shows up at the bottom of the
sun's disc-fortunate places for them to be, because if they'd been on the sides
of the sun (that is to say, actually its north or south poles, bearing in mind
our right-angle view from the earth's surface) they would have been hidden by
the enlarged lunar disc and we might have seen no prominences at all.

Now we all know why we came here. Photographs don't do it. Photographs can't
show the emitted light from the corona, and most of all, photographs don't show
the wide, dark sky surrounding the fantastic eclipsed sun. If I'd seen it
without previous knowledge I'd certainly have taken it for a UFO, a Disneyland
special effect, or a miracle; in fact, what it is is wonderful. Next to me an
elderly man is weeping with joy, and most of the rest of us are close.

We have four minutes and some seconds of fine, clear, unobstructed totality, and
it passes in the wink of an eye.

When we get around to remembering the rest of the world we find out that Baja
did as well as we did, but almost all the thousands onshore on the island of
Hawaii itself were socked in. About the only ones in the area other than
ourselves who saw true totality were the handful of astronomers on top of Mauna
Kea. They were above the clouds. There was a touch of ice fog at the surface,
but the eclipse was clear.

And on our ship, when the show was over, Michael, the seven-year-old who had
mourned his absence from his Nintendo, turned to his grandfather and said, "Now
I have something to tell my grandchildren."

"What grandchildren?" his grandfather asked. "You've been telling us you were
never going to get married."

"That was then," Michael said. "Now I've changed my mind."


by FREDERICK POHL