Sun catcher

Bill Welbon captures the sun in eclipse, at its most vulnerable, beautiful and mysterious. But not at its most romantic: Romance is something he finds right here on Earth.

By LANE DeGREGORY

© St. Petersburg Times,
published June 21, 2001

[AP photo] A Diamond Ring effect occurs when the eclipse nears totality and the last bulge of light bursts from one end like a gemstone on a ring.

BELLEAIR -- "At first, you really don't notice it," Bill Welbon says, stacking golf shirts into a black suitcase. "But by the time the moon covers half the sun, the light starts to shift some, the temperature drops suddenly, then things start to happen."

He wraps a soft cloth around a hand-held barometer, slides it in beside the shirts, does the same with a thermometer. He's in the dining room of his Belleair home, packing for a trip to Africa. In a few hours, he'll leave for the Tampa airport.

He's 77.

He's still chasing the sun.

He has traveled through 50 countries and to every continent. He has chartered ships to cruise distant seas, hired planes to fly along the penumbra, hiked Australia's Outback and braved Boston's side streets. He has seen 19 total solar eclipses so far.

Today, on a remote farm in central Africa, on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, Welbon will watch his 20th. He'll spend just over four minutes staring at what he calls "the most awe-inspiring sight in the universe."

By this afternoon, he will have spent more than one hour in total darkness during daylight.

He already has 56 minutes and 22 seconds. He needs only 31/2 minutes more. Surely, this trip will do it.

Not that he wants a plaque or anything. Not that he even wants bragging rights or expects anyone to understand.

"When it's over, you've accomplished your mission, seen a spectacular sight," he says, stuffing a digital light meter under some socks. "And, hopefully, you got some good data that might be useful."

[Times photo: Lane DeGregory] Memories that will never be eclipsed are collected in four thick scrapbooks that hold court on Bill Welbon’s dining room table.

A more poetic soul would describe the early color shifts of a solar eclipse, when bruise-purple plumes shoot through the noon-blue sky. He would talk about the ephemeral shadow bands rippling along the horizon, the creeping darkness, the eerie cool. He would explain how ancient cultures feared eclipses, thought a dragon was devouring the sun; how, in Indonesia, pregnant women still hide under their beds to avoid the evil they think eclipses bring; how birds and animals head home, thinking nighttime is approaching even though it's midday; how stars come out and planets twinkle.

Welbon would rather talk of numbers and penumbra paths, recite fluctuations in air pressure or light levels of the zenith sky.

During the darkest minutes of the expeditions, while eclipse seekers all around him shout, cry, jump up and down, pray and clink Champagne glasses, Welbon whips out a pocket notebook and records the air temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and light level.

Eclipses may be mystical or metaphysical or religious or fearsome or even otherworldly for some.

For Welbon, they're pure science -- nothing but a mathematically predictable phenomenon of the physical world.

He finds no romance in the heavens.

He has plenty of that here on Earth.

Welbon spent most of his boyhood in Miami, riding bikes, fishing with friends, building rockets in his back yard. His granddad was an avid amateur astronomer. He taught Welbon how to spot the planets, pronounce the constellations' names, scan the sky.

When Welbon was 8, his mother moved him to Ohio. His science teacher showed him how to make strips of smoked glass, so he could see a solar eclipse without burning his eyes. On a playground outside his Cincinnati elementary school, Welbon first watched the moon swallow daylight.

All through adolescence, he subscribed to Popular Science. He pored over Galileo's designs, taught himself to build a telescope. When he moved back to Miami for high school, he showed his old friends how to construct pinhole cameras so they could study the sun without injuring their eyes.

In September 1944, at 21, Welbon was sent to Europe to fight in World War II. He packed two chemistry textbooks, an astronomy guide and a photo of a smiling girl with long, dark hair. He had been dating Dorothea for more than three years. Almost every Saturday night while he was stationed at Fort Benning, he had hitched a ride to Atlanta so he could sit beside her in church.

Almost every night in Europe, sitting in his dark Army tent, he would stare at her picture and wish himself home.

But while he was still overseas, Dorothea wrote she was marrying an Air Force lieutenant. "I was broken-hearted," Welbon says. He focused his attention on chemistry, his telescope on the skies. When he returned stateside, he enrolled at Princeton.

A couple of years later, at an Orange Bowl party, Welbon met a woman named Ann Marie. They had been in third grade together, she reminded him. They married in 1948, had three sons, shared almost a half-century of diapers and diplomas and Sunday dinners.

Welbon worked as a General Electric chemist for 35 years. He planned almost every vacation around solar eclipses. And after their children were grown, while their grandchildren were being born, Ann Marie accompanied Welbon on his expeditions. She didn't care so much about the sun, or the darkness, or the data. But she liked the people, and she loved traveling.

"My wife was always very supportive," he says. "She understood how important solar eclipses are to me. It's just," he pauses, searching for the right words, trying to describe something indescribable, finally shaking his head and raising his soft voice slightly.

"You must see one!"

Bill Welbon photographed this total eclipse from the South China Sea in 1995 aboard the Marco Polo.

Through the ages, solar eclipses have inspired poets, priests and all sorts of artists. John Milton described an eclipse in Paradise Lost. William Wordsworth penned his impressions in The Eclipse of the Sun, 1820.

[Times photo: Lane DeGregory] This is the cardboard camera Bill Welbon used to shield his eyes while he watched an eclipse over Nova Scotia in 1972; it is now a part of his collection of eclipse memorabilia.

Total solar eclipses occur about once every 11/2 years. They happen when the moon moves directly into the path between the sun and the Earth. The shadow path -- the penumbra -- of a total solar eclipse can cover only 167 miles, at most. Even the longest ones last only 71/2 minutes. The United States won't be in the path of another total eclipse until 2017. Welbon says he won't live long enough to see that one. But he'll keep following them to remote regions as long as he's able, getting as close as he can.

He spent more than $4,000 on this Africa trip. He'll be away almost three weeks. All that . . . for four minutes in a shadow he has already seen 19 times.

Welbon is thin and tan, with white hair and milky blue eyes. He has been a member of the American Chemical Society for more than 50 years and belonged to the international Meteoritical Society for 40.

He catalogs his eclipse encounters in four thick scrapbooks he keeps on his dining room table. Photographs and airline ticket stubs, scientific graphs and cruise ship programs, certificates from eclipses and loads of lists spill from the plastic-lined pages.

One list, scribbled on Budget Rental Car stationery, traces his total solar eclipse sightings:

1. Ohio 1932

2. Boston 1952

3. Perry, Fla. 1970

4. Prince Edward Island 1972

5. Marsalia Atlantic 1973

6. Air Australia 1974

7. Australia 1976

8. Fair Seas of Mexico 1977

The list goes on and on. He followed the sun across the world and back again, to Kenya, Finland, Hawaii, Indonesia. He watched through a cardboard camera in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, on July 10, 1972 (and still has the box). He chartered a Boeing 727 with a group of eclipse seekers in 1979, and the crew removed the seats from one side of the plane so the passengers could set up telescopes and binoculars.

"When you fly with an eclipse, you can stretch the time in its totality by up to four minutes," Welbon says. "You have more of a chance that way of seeing things like the Diamond Ring or Bailey's Beads or the corona and its red prominences."

The Diamond Ring effect occurs when the moon is almost covering the sun and the last bulge of light bursts from one edge like a shining jewel. Bailey's Beads are droplets of light reflecting off lunar volcanoes or craters, making them look like a string of molten pearls. Prominences are liquid streamers spitting from the sun's surface -- each a rare bragging right in the world of sun seekers.

"Everyone's always asking me, 'Aren't they all the same?' " Welbon says. "I tell them, 'No way!' "

He fans through a pile of photographs, trying to prove it. In each one, a black orb is surrounded by a halo of amber light. The sky behind is dark.

They all look pretty much the same.

"In the first place, the total path width is different for each one," he says, pointing to a chart in a thick textbook called The Canon of Solar Eclipses. "If the path is wide, you may not see light on the horizon. And, depending on the clouds, you might miss it entirely. In 1973, Venus showed up very bright."

On an Orient Lines cruise through the South China Sea in 1995, the captain awarded Welbon and his wife a piece of parchment. "Your 2 minutes and 9 seconds bathed in lunar shadow has earned the gratitude of a grateful syzygy," the paper said. "You are hereby enrolled into the Coronal Hall of Flame."

In March 1998, Welbon and his wife went on an eclipse cruise to the Caribbean. A few weeks after they returned, Ann Marie got sick. She died in July. She and Welbon had been married 49 years, 10 months.

That summer seemed to drag on forever. Welbon's only solace was in planning a cruise to the Black Sea. It would be the first eclipse trip he'd taken without his wife since the late '70s.

He wasn't sure he wanted to do it alone. Wasn't sure he wanted to miss one, either.

Just before Christmas, Welbon started cleaning out some closets in his home north of Clearwater. He found a box he had long forgotten about. Inside was a pile of yellowed letters.

One was from his first girlfriend. She had sent it to him in 1944, while he was driving a Jeep along the front lines during World War II. He re-read it, remembered, resolved to find out what had happened to Dorothea.

Maybe it was fate. Maybe something more scientific. Maybe grateful syzygy, whatever that is.

Welbon doesn't know. Never wonders why.

He's just glad he found that letter.

Fifty-five years after losing track of Dorothea, he tracked her down. She was a grandmother, too, long divorced from the Air Force officer. Living alone in Durham, N.C.

Of course, she remembered him. Of course, she wanted to see him. He flew to Raleigh three days later, bringing the faded photograph of her he'd held onto all those years.

"She had changed a lot, sure," he says, showing portraits of Dorothea taken a half-century apart. "But she was sure glad to see me. I visited her a lot that year. We met each other's children and grandchildren."

They married a year later. He moved into her North Carolina home. About once a month, he comes back to Florida to check on his house and his grandkids.

Dorothea never comes with him. She doesn't travel well, can barely see. She wears thick, black wrap-around glasses, even indoors.

He's sorry he had to leave her behind on this Africa trip. Sorrier still that she won't be able to see any eclipse, ever.

He promised he'd call every day. "Two or three times a day, actually," he says. He promised he'd describe "the most awe-inspiring sight in the universe."

So while the moon is slurping up the sunlight, Welbon will tell his new wife -- his first love -- about the barometric pressure and the light levels and whether the temperature dropped four degrees or 14. He'll tell her about the path of totality. He'll tell her about the birds, because she'll ask.

And, before he hangs up, he'll tell her that he loves her.

All the way up to the sun and back again.

Seeing the eclipse

The total solar eclipse occuring today will be most visible in Africa and will be seen only from the Southern Hemisphere.

But folks around the world can watch it on the Internet via a live Web broadcast. Coverage here should begin about 9 a.m. and continue through the evening. The total eclipse is projected to occur about 3 p.m. EST.

To watch, log on to www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/zambia/index.html and click on "webcasts," then on "zambia." Finally, click on the map of Zambia.

And watch one of the wonders of the universe.

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