The solar telescope is a fixed tube that throws an image of the sun onto a table in a dark room, and it is only used in daylight, for the obvious reason. Its shutter opens at twenty four minutes past six every morning, before dawn, in the dark, on a motor that has no timer. A disc appears on the table, bright, the size the sun's image is. And at the time a total eclipse crossed this hill in 1927, to the second, the disc goes out, for twenty three seconds, and comes back, and the shutter closes.
I am the solar observer at an observatory that still has a solar telescope, which is a long fixed tube with a mirror at the top that throws the sun's image down onto a table in a darkened room, and the room is where I spend my days, and where something spends its mornings.
The telescope.
A mirror on the roof that tracks the sun and sends its light down the tube to a lens and onto a white table, where the sun's image is a disc the size of a dinner plate and you can see the spots on it. The shutter on the roof opens when I open it, on a motor, with a switch, and there is no timer, because you would not want one on a solar telescope.
At twenty four minutes past six every morning, in the dark, it opens.
The disc.
It is dark outside. The sun is below the horizon. The shutter opens and on the table in the dark room a disc appears. Bright. Sharp. The size the sun's image is. With spots on it, a group near the edge, the same group every morning, and the group is not on the sun now, I have checked against the real sun an hour later, and it is a group that was on the sun, by the old drawings, in June 1927.
The disc is on the table for eleven minutes. Then, from the right edge, a dark curve comes across it, the way the moon comes across the sun in an eclipse, and covers it, and at a time I have to the second, the disc is gone, black, and round the black there is a ring, faint, which is the corona, which you cannot project, which is on my table, and it stays for twenty three seconds, and the moon goes on across and the disc comes back from the left, and when it is whole the shutter closes.
The eclipse.
1927. A total eclipse crossed the north of the country and the line of totality crossed this hill, and the observatory had been built partly in hope of it, and the observers had prepared for years, and on the morning the cloud came in off the sea and totality passed above the cloud at twenty four minutes past six and some seconds and nobody on the hill saw it, and the records of that morning are one page, and the page says, in the director's hand, cloud, cloud, cloud, and then, totality, unseen, twenty three seconds, and then the page is blank.
Twenty three seconds. The disc on my table goes out for twenty three.
What has been checked.
The shutter motor, disconnected. The shutter opens at twenty four past six. The room, at twenty past six, by me, in the dark, at the table. The shutter opened above me, I heard it. The disc came onto the table in front of me, and I am a solar observer and I know the sun's image on that table better than my own face, and it was the sun, and the spots were the 1927 group, and at the time the dark edge came across, and beside me, at the table, in the dark, somebody breathed in and held it, the way you hold your breath for totality, and the disc went black, and the corona was there, on a table, in a room, and a voice beside me said, very quietly, in the accent of a hundred years ago, oh, there it is.
Twenty three seconds. Then the light came back and the breath went out and the shutter closed.
Who.
The director of 1927. He had built the solar telescope for the eclipse. He had stood under cloud for the twenty three seconds he had waited a career for, and the history says he did not speak of it afterwards, and that he died in the forties without having seen a total eclipse, which was, the history says, the one thing he had wanted.
He is seeing it. Every morning. The solar telescope he built shows him the eclipse he missed, on the table, the way it would have looked if the cloud had not come, and he holds his breath, and he says, there it is.
What is done about it.
The shutter opening is on the dome log every morning as an unscheduled operation and the solar telescope's mirror is exposed to the night air for eleven minutes and has needed cleaning, and the director, the current one, has asked me why the solar shutter opens before dawn, and I have shown her the 1927 page, and she has asked to be in the room, once, and she was, and she held her breath too.
What I do.
I observe the sun.
An eclipse is drawn. That was the purpose: you drew the corona in the seconds you had, fast, in pencil, on a prepared card, and the drawings were the science, and the 1927 cards are in the archive, blank, with the director's name on them and the time and the word, cloud.
I have had the cards out. At twenty past six I am at the table with one of them and a pencil, and when the disc goes black and the corona comes I draw. Twenty three seconds is not long and I am not good and the drawing is what it is, but it is the corona of June 1927 as it was above the cloud, drawn on the card prepared for it, and I put the time on, and I put his name, because it is his card, and I put mine under it, and the card goes back in the archive with the others, and the archive now has a set of drawings of the 1927 eclipse from this station, a hundred years late, which is a thing that has never happened in the history of astronomy and which I am not going to publish.
The breath beside me, at totality, is steadier than it was. The first mornings it shook. It does not now. A man who waited his whole life for twenty three seconds and missed them has had them, now, a hundred times, and is, I think, getting used to it, and the last morning, at the end, as the light came back, he said something new, which was, did you get it, and I said, yes, and he said, good man, and the shutter closed.