Carbondale and Eclipses

 Big news today was a total eclipse, visible in some parts of this country, and for much of the country a visible partial eclipse.  Apparently, there are total eclipses about every two years, but most of these appear over the ocean, and not in this country.   However, the news mentioned that there was one town in America that was in the totality path for both today's, and the last one that was seen in this country, back in 2017, and that is Carbondale, Illinois.  I know the town well, as I used to live there,during the three years I attended, and got my MFA in Printmaking, from Southern Illinois University.  During the years I was there, I also experienced an eclipse, an annular eclipse (on May 10, 1994), which I made the subject of an artwork, a daily woodcut in my Fourth of July series.  That print, and the whole series, can be seen online on a blog I did for that series.

By my count, that makes three eclipses in a 30 year period in one town, which seems kind of unusual to me.  While there, I heard a story that for a brief time in the 1960's, the town was considered the cosmological center of the universe, which resulted in a brief hippy invasion, but that was before my time.   (I also heard a story about a professor that suddenly disliked a graduate student, tried unsuccessfully to get his MFA rescinded, and then tried to set fire to the student's trailer while he was in it, but again, that was before my time.)   I guess Carbondale is just that kind of place.

Here in the east, we were only scheduled to get a partial eclipse, but it still got full tv coverage all day, starting with the first appearance in Mexico, and then following the path of totality, from there to Vermont, passing through Carbondale along the way.   It didn't hurt that the ABC network has an affiliate in southern Illinois, not too far from Carbondale.  I think back then it was in Carterville (just down the highway from Carbondale), though I think it has moved a little now.  I know this for two reasons.  One is that when I lived there I chose not to get cable, but got my networks over the airwaves, from Illinois (ABC), from Paducah, Kentucky (NBC), and Cape Girardeau. Missouri (CBS and Fox), plus the school was seat to the local PBS station, and it's official radio station was an NPR.  (to handle all the Radio/Television students that needed some air time, a second tiny radio station was permitted to exist, WIDB, which is the one I worked at for my three years there)  Also, I remember that local ABC sent a reporter to cover our Cardboard Boat Regatta, an annual event that was participated in by many students, but required for the college's 3D students the spring semester.  When my 3D students at Kean complained about doing too much work, I showed them photos of the boats that students there made and raced around the lake for their 3D class.  It shut them up in a hurry.  I had a photo of that reporter, holding her ABC microphone, reporting on the event, but that's in storage, so you won't be seeing it here.  However, I am posting a photo of the total eclipse as it appeared in Carbondale today, taken from the television.  (news warned us that trying to take photos of the actual eclipse without special filters for the camera could damage it, and I need this camera to keep working)  They can afford the filters for their cameras.

To view the eclipse here, I made a pinhole viewer, much like the one we used in Carbondale to view that eclipse back in 1994.  Worked just as well.