seeing the Annular Solar Eclipse

January 20th, 2010

At the Solar Eclipse the skies belong to the people again and that’s why I had to go there, to see how I could make my own connection with the Solar System and how other people did too.

Hinduism contains an ancient science of eclipses that now manifest in rituals: not eating during an eclipse, not looking at an eclipse, taking a bath after the eclipse. The particular, unusual circumstances of an eclipse, more than likely create atmospheric disturbances that could make it wise to be indoors and not eat. The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre were making tests at Dhanushkodi, so maybe they would rediscover this.

I took a night bus to Madurai and then at six in the morning, a car to Rameshwaram. The sun rise was impressively rich and red-orange, it looked ready for a special day. With the morning mist it turned white like the moon. I was going to the place where the Bangalore Astronomy Society were meeting. I wanted to get a sense of how they helped people participate in astronomy.

The first people I found had this viewer, made with a mirror in the tube, a reflector to take the image down the box tunnel, a lens to focus and the tracing paper to catch the image.

Other people set up cameras with filters to take photos, but these were for one person at a time. I liked how these people had made something that let lots of people watch at once. I liked how the momentous singularity of the eclipse became reproduced on a tatty piece of tracing paper and a cardboard box, how it became part of the things on earth, not separate.

This was another device, made with a waste paper bin. Really like the little boy putting the goggles on to look. So funny!

The eclipse takes time and during that time we all found different ways to see the eclipse. What I found curious was tht you can’t look at the eclipse. You look most directly through your goggles, but even that feels like such a barrier and gives such an abstract black and white flat image. Its hard to think that this really is the moon passing over the sun. This was what I was trying to feel, that these were two celestial bodies and there was a distance between us, but the feeling didn’t come easily.

There was a tree on its own across the sands and I realised people must be looking at the shadows and for some time we all played with the pin hole-shadow-camera obscura.

A woman was making a pattern of holes, she made a paisley shape and together the group figured out how to cast the eclipses. Someone said we should make a heart next.

Then making the eclipse appear with our hands. That was very poetic. To use your hands instead of your eyes.

As the moon entered the sun entirely there was great excitement and crowding round the viewers. This was what people wanted because they could photograph and look at the same time.

Two ladies lay on the ground watching through the goggles and it seemed to me that was the best way to look, forget the photos. So for this first or second contact that’s what I did. There is something extremely beautiful about this shape with the inner circle just touching the outer circle. Its the point at which everyone cries out to see ‘Bailey’s Beads’, the slightly bumpy edge, and this I was told later is actually caused by the craters and mountains of the moon. The texture of the moon itself is what you see, very wonderful.

I wear my Grandma’s wedding ring when I travel alone here sometimes. A gold ring. I look at other people’s photos now of this annularity and it gives me time to remember how beautiful this gold ring of the sun was to see, even in this very patchy, messy way that we were seeing.

Somebody said that the skies use to belong to everyone equally, but now that science, scientists and scientific instruments have discovered so much more, when we look at the skies we are ignorant. We know that what science knows is way beyond us. The cities too have taken away the stars that we could know.

As an artist interested in creating group viewing experiences for watching the cosmos, it was easy to see that these contraptions could be pushed a further, that if the image was projected into a dark room, like the meditation hall we were right next to, the number of people able to watch and the quality of seeing could become much richer, by paying attention to the aesthetics.

I was using a mirror to put the eclipse on the Swami Vivekanandar Memorial Hall.

The little boy who looked like a Bollywood star wanted to do the same and he put the image momentarily inside the doorway of the hall and there it was, the eclipse inside a dark building, very stunning. I don’t have the picture and the rush towards annularity was starting, but that would have been the thing to do.

This is a picture my friend Rohini Devasher took of the eclipse chasers she was with from Delhi S.P.A.C.E. (Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators) in Varkala, just to see some more of this range of instrumentation for looking at something, the sun, that lets us see, but which we can’t see directly, that blinds us.

I’d love to make a building and a mirror for next time. But at the eclipse I liked the makeshift technology, the hands on processes, th way we formed a group helping each other to see. On the way back I was talking to the three amateur astronomers who gave me a lift about putting in a proposal to use the Kavalur observatory. Pavan didn’t think non-professionals would have any hope of access, but I got really defensive and said yes they could and that its only when you bring in people from other backgrounds to understand and use technology that new applications can be found. Rishi said that was what had happened with computers. It was suddenly very clear that the instrumentation of cosmic observation is proprietary and attached to hierarchies of knowledge and that this solar eclipse was a rare opportunity to break that down and for people to create their own observatories.

elsewhere, event, moon, imagination, India, sun, instrumentation, public | Comments | Trackback