Solar eclipse brings observers to Mt. Wilson
Visitors to Mt. Wilson Observatory viewed the partial solar eclipse Thursday through various telescopes.
To mark the solar eclipse that swept across the Southern California sky on Thursday — the first one seen in Los Angeles in 2 1/2 years — the Cosmic Cafe on Mt. Wilson was serving up sandwiches and chili.
This was kind of a big deal. After all, the place is usually closed on weekdays.
“Whenever there is an eclipse or a meteor shower, we always get people driving up here,” said Don Nicholson, deputy director of public affairs for the Mt. Wilson Observatory. “We wanted to be ready.”
The hordes never came, but just after 2 p.m. when the eclipse began, a dozen people crowded into the base of the gleaming, white 150-foot solar tower, which has been in operation since 1912.
The telescope projected a bright image of the sun on a white table with what looked like a small, black semicircle bite taken out of the top.
If you looked closely, you could see that the black edges of the bite mark were not perfectly smooth.
“There you can see some of the mountaintops of the moon,” said Gale Gant, a retired engineer who has worked as a docent at the observatory for 15 years.
In the middle of the sun’s face was a large and complicated blemish — darker in some places, lighter in others. This was active region 12192, one of the largest sunspots to be recorded in several years. Astronomers say it is roughly the size of Jupiter.
If the sunspot releases a powerful solar flare, some satellites could be in trouble, but on the day of the solar eclipse it was a welcome sight.
“The sun has a bellybutton!” said Bob Dollins, who once worked for IBM and now leads tours at the observatory.
In the parking lot below the observatory, amateur astronomers had set up a dozen telescopes of various types and sizes. Barry Megdal, an observatory volunteer from Northridge, had a telescope outfitted with a hydrogen alpha filter, which lets viewers see a hotter layer of the sun than is visible in white light.
Through his telescope, observers could see small pointy prominences jutting out of the sun — solar material that was leaping off the sun’s surface.
The small crowd of observers was eclectic. Corina Harmon of Altadena was celebrating her 27th birthday. Gene Stout of Simi Valley wanted his home-schooled children, Leianna, 8, and David, 13, to see an eclipse firsthand. Erin Johnson, a scientific illustrator, and her yoga teacher Hari Kaur, from New York, felt they were “exploring the universe together,” as Johnson put it.
“This is my first day in L.A. and this is where she takes me,” Kaur said. “I love traveling through the sky.”
Twitter: @DeborahNetburn
