The Corona of 1887: An Eclipse Drawn by Hand
The sun is a perfect black disc, and out of it the corona pours: long equatorial streamers reaching left and right like wings, fainter plumes at the poles, and just at the edge of the darkened disc, on the lower limb, a small bright point where the last light catches. It is a drawing, not a photograph, made to record the total solar eclipse of Friday, August 19, 1887, and every streamer in it was put down by a human hand working from memory and sketch in the minutes after totality ended.
The eclipse of 1887 was one of the century's great scientific expeditions. Its path of totality ran from Germany across Poland, Russia and Siberia, then Mongolia and China to Japan, and astronomers from half the world traveled into the Russian Empire to meet it, because the corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, could then be studied only during eclipses, and eclipses do not wait for clear skies.
From the Collection
Solar Eclipse Corona – 1887 Scientific Astronomy Illustration Vintage Print
The sun's corona as drawn during the total solar eclipse of August 19, 1887, across Russia and Siberia.
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Keep Reading
Two Minutes of Darkness
Totality at any site lasted about two minutes, and everything depended on using them. Eclipse parties of the era were small armies of technique: telescopes for the new photography, spectroscopes hunting the corona's strange green emission line, and, indispensably, artists, because the camera of 1887 could not do what the eye could. Photographic plates caught the bright inner corona and burned out; the eye, adapting in the darkness, could follow the streamers out to their faint tips, and a trained draftsman could fix their shape, length and angle before the sun returned.
The drawn corona in this print is characteristic of the quiet sun: the long streamers extend along the sun's equator, east and west, in the classic butterfly or winged form that observers of the period learned to expect when sunspots were few. Such drawings, lithographed for the expedition reports and the popular astronomy press, were not illustrations of the data. They were the data, the permanent record against which the next eclipse's corona would be compared.
Mendeleev, Alone in a Balloon
The eclipse's most famous observer was not an astronomer at all. Dmitri Mendeleev, the great chemist of the periodic table, was determined to study the corona from above the clouds that threatened the Russian stations, and near Klin, outside Moscow, a military balloon was made ready. When the morning proved too windy for two, Mendeleev, who had never flown, climbed in alone, wet the ropes to shed weight, and ascended solo to some 3,000 meters, watching the corona through a break in the cloud while managing a balloon he barely knew how to fly. He landed safely in a field miles away and received a medal from the French Academy of Aerostatic Meteorology for the flight.
The story tells you what the corona was worth in 1887: one of the world's most valuable scientists risked himself in an unfamiliar aircraft for two minutes of it. The mystery was total. The corona was millions of degrees hot at a sun whose surface was merely thousands, a fact not yet even measurable; it showed an emission line matching no known element, which chemists attributed to a hypothetical substance, coronium. Every streamer drawing, this one included, was evidence in the case.
The Expeditions
The armies that met the 1887 shadow deserve a fuller picture. Eclipse chasing in the late nineteenth century was international science at its most organized: national expeditions with tons of instruments traveled by rail and ship to stations chosen years ahead along the predicted path, negotiated with local authorities, drilled their two minute routines like artillery crews, and published their results in great illustrated reports. The 1887 eclipse drew parties across Russia and Siberia, its line of totality conveniently following the route of empire, and the observations were compared for decades afterward, drawing against drawing, photograph against photograph.
The stakes explain the effort. The corona was then the largest unexplained object in the solar system, brighter than the full moon, structured like blown silk, radiating lines of light from an element unknown on earth. Every eclipse was a laboratory that opened for two minutes at a time, in a place not of the scientists' choosing. The drawings that survive from 1887, this corona among them, are the logbooks of that laboratory, made under conditions closer to battle than to the observatory, and their calm, heraldic beauty is all the more remarkable for it.
From Sketch to Lithograph
The image's journey to the wall is part of its interest. The observer's field sketch, annotated in the dark, was worked up into a finished drawing, then transferred to the lithographic stone or the engraver's plate for the published reports and magazines through which most of the world saw the eclipse. Each stage smoothed and regularized the streamers a little, which is why period eclipse plates share a heraldic quality, the corona as a kind of solar coat of arms, that photographs never have.
Chekhov, then a young writer of comic stories, published a tale touching on the eclipse within weeks of it, one small sign of how completely the event occupied the public mind along its path. The drawing survived the story's century better than the mystery did: coronium turned out to be iron so highly ionized that its light was unrecognizable, the heat paradox was traced to the sun's magnetic violence, and eclipse drawing gave way to coronagraphs and space telescopes. What remains is the record of the moment when the sun's crown could be known only by going out, standing in its shadow, and drawing very fast.
