The Astrophysicist Who 'Hijacked' A Queen

What’s a scientist to do when an eclipse is best seen at sea? Commandeer an ocean liner On a dark night last March, the Queen Elizabeth II was sprinting across the Java Sea, tossing aside waves like an impatient leviathan. Nine mighty engines throbbed at full throttle, and the crew navigated through poorly charted waters with all the urgency and care of wartime maneuvers. But the ocean liner wasn’t rushing to deliver troops—as it had during the Falklands conflict--nor even to rescue a vessel in distress. Instead, it was pursuing science: This Queen had a date with an eclipse. For Ken Brecher, anxiously pacing the liner’s deck, the dash across the sea was the final leg of a year-long odyssey. An astrophysicist at Boston University, Brecher was the man who had “hijacked” the Queen--all because he wanted to watch the sun disappear behind the moon. And when the night was over, he would learn whether his scheme was to succeed or fail. The audacious plan had been hatched early in the spring of 1987, when Brecher had a powerful urge to see a total eclipse of the sun. He knew that a band of darkness would sweep across Indonesia and the southern Philippines for two minutes on the morning of March 18, 1988. But he also knew that terrestrial viewing locations had serious drawbacks. Communist insurgents on the Philippine island of Mindanao might make a viewing party a trifle risky. And meteorologists told him that there are almost always clouds over Sumatra and Borneo. So why not commandeer a cruise ship and steer for clear skies? It was a beguiling notion, and a personal challenge. “I’ll admit it. wanted to see if I could get myself a ship and take it to an eclipse,” he says; “I’d never seen an eclipse before." Shipboard Culture Brecher knew that it could be done: several cruise lines had previously added astronomical events— from Halley’s Comet to eclipses— to their itineraries. He also knew what to offer in return: a devotee of sea cruises, he’d carved out a comfortable niche for himself as a shipboard lecturer, bringing Mesoamerican archeoastronomy and other bits of culture to the dance and shuffleboard set. There was even some interesting science to be done. Brecher was intrigued by a phenomenon called “shadow bands,” dark stripes that seem to sweep across land or water at the beginning and end of a total eclipse. The bands had been seen a number of times, but never photographed. Using new high-resolution video cameras, Brecher hoped he could be the first to capture the spectacle on film. Before he could raise anchor, Brecher had to find a ship. Fortunately, cruise schedules are almost as easy to predict as eclipses, and the answer lay no farther than a travel agency and the telephone. By chance, the QEII was due to be in Singapore for the nights of March 17 and 18,” he says. Of course, 400-odd miles of ocean studded with reefs and low-lying islands lie between Singapore and the eclipse path. But that didn’t daunt Brecher. He charted a possible path and calculated that the Cunard liner was just fast enough Indeed, she was the only cruise ship with sufficient speed to steam the distance overnight. A Novel Proposal “I wrote a proposal to Cunard explaining that the QEII could make the eclipse and offering to give a series of lectures on board,” Brecher says. Cagily crafted to provide exactly what virtually every cruise could use more of—novelty and scholarship—the proposal was irresistible. Says Brecher, “Here I am detouring a ship worth $400 million, and, in a time much faster than any government agency takes to make decisions, they agreed.” “We thought it was a very good idea,” explains George Donahue, Cunard’s assistant vice president for marketing and promotion. “A solar eclipse would provide a spectacular diversion to passengers making the world cruise." So too for scientists, it seems. Brecher figured he needed a team of about four people to help with the shadow band experiment and give entertaining lectures to passengers. And as soon as word of the fortnight’s luxury trip in exotic waters got around, scientific friends and colleagues began descending on Brecher’s doorstep, topsiders in hand. Edward Brooks used his special expertise to get onto the Brecher team; a veteran of forecasting weather for eclipses, the Boston College meteorologist knew he’d be indispensable in the cat and mouse game of finding clear skies. Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Owen Gingerich used a more personal approach. An old friend, Gingerich threatened not to speak to Brecher anymore if he wasn’t invited. Of course, it helped that “Owen is one of the best public speakers in astronomy,” says Brecher. Two others rounded out the group. The real drama began after the QEII slipped her moorings in Singapore for the nocturnal dash to the eclipse’s path. The night was cloudy and dark, hardly propitious for viewing the next morning’s big event. Even Ed Brooks, poring over his weather maps and satellite data, wasn’t sure that he would find an open patch of sky. And the Queen herself heightened the excitement; her satellite navigation system was mysteriously on the fritz. “It was the first time that ever happened to me in four years on the ship,” says First Officer Daniel Robinson, the navigation officer on duty that night. So one of the most sophisticated ships in the world hurtled through unfamiliar waters at almost 30 knots, navigat ing between islands and reefs by the centuries-old method of dead-reckoning. It was all in a day’s work, says Robinson with typical British aplomb. But Brooks wasn’t quite so confident. The success or failure of the whole expedition rested on his meteorological acumen, and finding clear skies in the cloudy Java Sea was a forbidding task. “It was a real challenge,” he admits. His original plan had been to park the ship downwind of a mountainous island in the Karimata Strait, hoping that the peak would empty the breeze of moisture. The previous day, however, he had discovered that the area was gripped in an unusual weather pattern, and an anomalous dry patch hovered over the sea on the other side of the island. He decided to take a chance and steer for the spot. The gamble paid off. Just before dawn, the clouds parted. First Officer Robinson dragged out a trusty old-fashioned sextant for a star sight, confirming that the Queen and her 2,000 passengers were precisely where he thought they were. “The navigator was very proud of himself,” recalls Gingerich. “He was determined to show off his prowess even more by taking the ship right to the center line of the eclipse’s path.” But Brooks pointed to a bank of approaching clouds and prevailed on the captain to stop short. “We got far enough so that we only lost about two seconds off the duration of the eclipse,” says Brooks. In the early light of dawn, Brecher set up a large screen on deck and focused his video camera on it. Any shadow bands that ffickered across the screen would be captured on video tape for posterity. Then, as the astrophysicist and hundreds of passengers waited expectantly, the sun ducked behind the moon., “It was a great eclipse,” says Gingerich. “There were three spectacular prominences and a lot of fine structure in the corona.” But no shadow bands appeared. Brecher speculates that the atmosphere was simply too calm to cause the phenomenon—which depends on air turbulence—to occur. “Now I really understand what the doldrums mean,” says Brecher. Still, the eclipse was not without scientific interest. Based on the “enormous coronal loops,” says Brecher, “the sun seems to be turning on early in its sunspot cycle.” This helped confirm what other scientists had been noting in their measurements of radio interference and observations of sunspots themselves. Even if Brecher lost his shadow bands, he had to count himself lucky. Ten minutes after the totality, heavy clouds roiled over the still stationary Queen. Eclipse-watchers in other locations in Indonesia and the Philippines weren’t so fortunate. On Sumatra, for example, Williams College astronomer Jay Pasachoff was bathed in fog. “I guess our expedition was a scientific washout,” he says. What did the QEII’s passengers and crew think of their luck? Most were ecstatic. “It was the first time I had seen an eclipse,” says First Officer Robinson. “It was incredible. Everyone on board was thrilled.” Well, almost everyone. Some passengers apparently thought that the scientists were downright inconsiderate for staging the event so early in the morning. And so, if they bothered to wake up at all, they watched the eclipse on closed-circuit TV from the comfort of their staterooms.

The Astrophysicist Who 'Hijacked' A Queen

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