556 D. Todd — Amherst Eclipse Expedition. 



Art. LI. — The Amherst Eclipse Expedition / by David 



Todd. 



To observe a total eclipse successfully, one must have suit- 

 able instruments, he must get in the path of the shadow, and 

 he should have cloudless skies. In spite of both war and clouds, 

 the expedition secured results of value, though both these sin- 

 ister circumstances were operant against us. Fortunately we 

 had arrived in the middle of the eclipse belt just as mobili- 

 zation was beginning. 



The instruments taken from the home Observatory were 

 intended mainly for a photographic record of the corona, and 

 were a selection from those that had been found most suitable 

 in previous eclipse expeditions. Unluckily they got stranded 

 somewhere between Libau, the port of entry to Russia, and 

 Kieff in Southern Russia, near which was the location of our 

 eclipse station. And although the officials of the Imperial 

 Railways did everything in their power to locate them, they 

 arrived at the station only the night before the eclipse ; too late 

 to be of any use. 



Meanwhile, with many days of waiting at Kieff, itself very 

 near the line of central eclipse, though meteorologically not 

 very favorable, I had been successful in getting together an 

 auxiliary outfit for photographing the eclipse, and there was 

 abundant time for adjusting and testing it. 



Kieff is a very old city, with more than half a million inhab- 

 itants, and every modern necessity. Exploring its interesting 

 shops with Mr. George Martin Day, we very soon found a 

 Dallmeyer 6-inch portrait objective, the back lens of which 

 afforded a fine image of the sun l # 65 cm in diameter. Professor 

 DeMetz, Dean of the University in Kieff, accorded me 

 every facility of the department of physics, where we had an 

 excellent tube constructed, and fitted with the necessary focal- 

 plane shutter (aThornton-Pickard), and a new Dresden camera. 

 Unfortunately there was no time to supply the farther requi- 

 site of clock-work mounting, but everything else was there ; 

 and with the help of Professor Sleusarefsky, the instrument 

 was set up, tested and provisionally adjusted in the south front 

 of the Pedagogic Museum, one of the finest buildings in Kieff, 

 with a clear outlook for the eclipse. 



Had it remained there we should have secured nothing, as 

 this region for many miles around was covered under thick 

 clouds all through totality. But a fortunate meeting with 

 Count Andrew Bobrinsky at Kieff led to my acceptance of his 

 invitation to visit his estates in Smala, about one hundred miles 

 southeast of Kieff, where the chances of clear skies were rather 

 better than at Kieff itself. 



