He Missed It : Nondelivery of Filter Foils Big Plan to Film Eclipse

In the end, Tony Basurto watched Thursday’s solar eclipse like most of the rest of Southern California--on television, through dark-filtered glasses and with a homemade cardboard viewing box.

It was not what he had planned.

His Chatsworth house is equipped with a built-in observatory and telescope similar to those used by many universities. But a $385 filter that Basurto ordered to view the ballyhooed event did not arrive on time, foiling his plans to photograph the eclipse and host an “eclipse party.”

Without the filter, Basurto’s eight-inch Meade telescope was useless, and it spent the duration of the eclipse locked in the darkness of its 11-foot gray dome.

Basurto, meanwhile, stood on the sidewalk outside his house watching the moon’s shadow creep across the sun with a viewing box made out of an old shoe box.

“It’s just disgusting,” he said of the delayed filter. “We were so upset.”

Basurto ordered the filter--glass darkened with vaporized metal--Monday from an optical supply company in San Francisco because shops in Southern California were sold out. It was supposed to have arrived Wednesday, but by Thursday afternoon it was still missing.

Employees of the overnight delivery company that supposedly shipped the filter were looking for it Thursday, as were supervisors from the optical company that supposedly sent it, Basurto said. Yet no one knew where it was, or even if it had been sent, he said.

What will he do when--or if--the filter does arrive?

“I guess I’ll send it back,” Basurto said, adding that he won’t have much use for it.

In the days before the eclipse, Basurto, 35, had planned an eclipse party and spent about $350 to have an electrician fix the motor that rotates the observatory’s dome. The party was canceled Wednesday night, but the motor “had to be fixed anyway,” said Basurto, who bought the house and observatory in 1989.

Not much of an astronomer before he bought the house, Basurto now uses the observatory, built in 1981 by a previous owner, two or three times a month. Most recently, he said, he watched the paths of Mars, Venus and Jupiter nearly converge in the western sky.

The filter’s delay was doubly disappointing because Basurto originally wanted to view the eclipse from a sandy beach in Hawaii. But so did thousands of other people, and Basurto’s Reseda travel office was so swamped, he could not take the time off.

“That would have been nice.”