I enjoyed Deborah Kent’s article on American efforts to document and study the 1869 total solar eclipse (Physics Today, August 2019, page 46). At the April 2019 meeting of the American Physical Society, we were treated to a session titled “Centennial of the Eddington Eclipse Expedition.”
I’m curious. Were stars visible in any of the photos of the 1869 eclipse—or other eclipses in the days before general relativity? And would it have been possible that someone noticed the displacement of the stars’ positions as Arthur Eddington did in 1919, but before Albert Einstein published his theory in 1915?
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© 2020 American Institute of Physics.
2020
American Institute of Physics
