Solar eclipse maps from 1881 to 1890
Sources
The maps from the British Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris, the French Connaissance des Temps, are from the collection of Michael Zeiler, scanned from the library of U.C. Berkeley, or were found and extracted from http://books.google.com.
The maps from the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac from 1892 to 1890 are scanned from the collection of Michael Zeiler
The 1878 edition of Harper’s Weekly is from the collection of Michael Zeiler.
The pages from the Evening World and National Tribune were found at U.S. Library of Congress page on Chronicling America: Historican American Newspapers, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
J. N. Stockwell’s 1890 map of ancient solar eclipses is from http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1890AJ.....10...32S
The total solar eclipse of 1889 January 1 was favorably placed for the western United States and Canada with a path traversing over northern California through Montana and Manitoba.
In advance of the eclipse, Edward Singleton Holden, the director of the Lick Observatory situated near the San Francisco bay area, published a pamphlet with the title Suggestions for Observing the Total Eclipse of the Sun on January 1, 1889. This pamphlet can be found at http://www.archive.org/details/suggestionsforob00holdrich.
This pamphlet attracted the interest of a number of persons in the San Francisco area. One was Charles Burckhalter, a school teacher in Oakland. He had an interest in photography and was inspired by Holden’s pamphlet to organize a photographic expedition to the eclipse centerline at Cloverdale and make a contribution to the scientific study of the corona. This effort was very successful and the weather was perfect on eclipse day. In the aftermath of the eclipse, Holden and Burckhalter collaborated to begin the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, an important organization of U.S. amateur astronomers which is active to this day.
Some history about this eclipse and its influence on the founding of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific can be found at http://www.astrosociety.org/about/history.html.
Detail of Holden’s eclipse map from the pamphlet Suggestions for Observing the Total Eclipse of the Sun on January 1, 1889. The complete map is in the gallery below.
After the eclipse of 1889 January 1, Edward Singleton Holden wrote an article summarizing the findings of the 1889 January 1st expedition. This appeared in the April 1892 issue of Century Magazine. The diagram above is his composite drawing of the corona from several photographs. (Collection of Michael Zeiler)
Illustration from Eclipses, Past and Future, with General Hints for Observing the Heavens, 1889, by S.J. Johnson. Found at http://www.archive.org/details/eclipsespastfutu00johnuoft.
