Total Solar Eclipse

For slightly more than three minutes on February 25th the moon completely eclipsed the sun along a narrow nine‐thousand mile path extending from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean through central Africa to the Sudan and then northward across the Red Sea and Arabia, ending finally at sunset some hundreds of miles north of the Gobi desert near the Siberian city of Irkutsk. Teams of scientists from many parts of the world assembled at stations that were stategically located in or near the belt of totality. At Khartum, capital of the Anglo‐Egyptian Sudan, where the White and Blue Niles merge, some seventy expert observers from ten nations gathered to take advantage of the highly favorable conditions under which the eclipse took place at that point. The time of the eclipse being near noon at Khartum, refractive distortions of the earth’s atmosphere were all but absent, and clear skies at the time of the eclipse aided still further in insuring good conditions for observing the event.

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