Far from the cruises off the Baja peninsula or the prime view atop Hawaii`s Mauna Kea volcano, 5-year-old Brian Thompson tried to glimpse the eclipse through a viewer fashioned from an old cereal box.
The box didn`t work, but his mother`s rose-colored sunglasses and a piece of welder`s lens did just fine, and the boy pronounced the results ”pretty impressive.”
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For all the people who could afford the money and time for the perfect view of the eclipse, many more saw it the way Brian did-from places such as Harper College`s one-room observatory in Palatine, blinking through sunglasses, peering through cardboard cutouts, capturing the magic on the cheap.
”It`s the poor woman`s road to astronomy,” said Angie Eckstein, who watched from the Cernan Earth and Space Center at Triton College in River Grove, where the clusters of people wearing special mylar glasses gave the lawn outside the center the look of a 1950s theater featuring a 3-D movie.
For some viewers, the sky show was eclipsed by technical problems and a spectacular reminder that technology can`t trump nature.
Hundreds of people jammed the three Sky Theatres at Chicago`s Adler Planetarium, promised a look at the live broadcast of the total eclipse from Hawaii. But the Adler visitors` high anticipation dissolved into laughing, booing and clapping as technicians searched in vain for a broadcast of the eclipse.
Planetarium employees tried to appease the crowd with snippets of C-Span, the Home Shopping Network, soap operas and game shows. Some spectators took their disappointment back to their homes and offices, but most stayed to see the live, albeit less spectacular, Chicago version of the eclipse.
”Even just to watch it on a 6-foot screen, it`s such an intriguing event I felt I just had to be here,” said Jack Beem, a downtown lawyer who came to Adler on his lunch break.
Jim Sweitzer, who organized an eclipse experiment for 30 junior high and high school students visiting the Kersten Physics Teaching Center at the University of Chicago, explained the appeal of the eclipse this way: ”What`s amazing is that it happens exactly when it`s supposed to happen, like God`s clock.”
Though they might have preferred the view from Hawaii, those who had to settle with the view from Triton College showed little regret.
”I haven`t seen anybody who`s disappointed,” said Joe Schultz, a technician at the center. ”Most people don`t know what a total eclipse is.” Schultz does, though. He and some friends drove to an ”uncharted area”
of Montana back in February 1979 to get a better view of that year`s show.
”It`s a showing of nature at its best,” Schultz said. ”The fact that you get to view it even once makes you appreciate that you still have an earth to stand on.”
Schultz was part of a skeleton staff at the center because most of his co-workers took off for the Baja. ”I stayed back, gritted my teeth and said, `You`ve seen one, you`ve seen them all.` ”
For others, Thursday`s eclipse didn`t evoke scientific splendor so much as memories of when celestial happenings seemed even more magical.
Beth Farris, 35, a Palatine resident who came to the observatory at Harper, remembered making small eclipse-viewing boxes as a 3rd grader, and being wowed by the results.
”Now you expect it`s going to be far more intense. Something that`s truly a phenomenon is made to seem commonplace because of all the technology we live with,” Farris said.
”We`ve been visually stimulated for so long that something like this that`s truly remarkable . . . we kind of brush off.”