Seventeen photographs of the August 7, 1869, total eclipse of the Sun, arranged on a page. The black disc of the moon starts obscuring the Sun on the right side of the Sun’s image, and the 9th photo in the series shows the totality phase, with the remaining showing the moon’s disc retreating across the left side of the image of the Sun. Handwritten text below the photographs reads, “Eclipse Photographs. Presented Sept. 3rd, 1869.”
“I was so intensely absorbed in my work, and so dreadfully anxious for the success of the plate in the camera, upon which I then believed that the only chance of securing a photograph of the totality was staked, that I really paid no attention to anything but the chronometer beats, and my impression of the appearance of the phenomena already described is only as of some dimly-remembered dream.”
“With its fading came a solid, rushing darkness, that seemed to grow in the very air and close upon me from all sides, producing a strange sensation as of positive engulfment by something black and material, whose embrace was all the more thrilling from being swift, noiseless, and impalpable.”
Those are remarks by the Army Medical Museum’s Asst. Surgeon Edward Curtis on his diligent effort to document the total solar eclipse of August 7, 1869, in a report to the War Department later that same year. Using precisely-timed exposures on glass-plate negatives, the highly-choreographed team from the museum and the United States Naval Observatory took 122 photos during the celestial event.
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