In Land of Movie Stars, Sun Has Its Day in the Spotlight

For an hour and a half Thursday, Californians turned off the freeways, climbed out of cars, emerged from concrete and steel office buildings and generally broke with their daily routines to gaze at a fading star.

For literally millions of people throughout the Southland, who have long been accustomed to seeing movie and television stars come and go, Thursday’s eclipse of Earth’s favorite star was an awesome moment, bringing them momentarily in touch, not with the highlights of Hollywood, but with the marvels of nature.

In Los Angeles, the eclipse began at 10:12 a.m. and ended at 12:47 p.m. and at its peak darkened no more than three-quarters of the sun.

At the Griffith Observatory, a capacity crowd of about 3,000 people brought telescopes, cameras, lounge chairs and picnic lunches to the popular sky-gazing site.

“It’s great!” exclaimed Griffith Observatory astronomer John Mosley. “The high clouds and fog don’t matter. We were worried about not being able to see it at all.”

Ronald Baum and Vilma Vega picked the darkest moment of the day to exchange vows. At precisely 11:30 a.m., the Angeleno Heights couple said their “I do’s” under the shadow of the moon.

“I wanted to make it a cosmic coupling,” explained Baum after the couple posed for photos on the steps of the downtown County Courthouse. “I call her affectionately ‘Moon,’ so if I’m ‘Apollo,’ she’s eclipsing me all the time.”

Most Californians had to worry about the more mundane problem of protecting their eyes during the event.

To avoid injuries, many people watched through Mylar glasses, hand-held filters or home-made cardboard pinhole viewing boxes.

Some were more inventive.

At UCLA, doctors and nurses crowded onto lawns to peer at the sky through developed X-rays. At the Mt. Wilson Observatory, Mike Klien, 27, a particle physicist from Pasadena, held up a chocolate chip cookie with a bite taken out to match the crescent of overlap. In Lancaster, about a half dozen students and teachers at the Page Beauty School stood on the sidewalk watching with a pair of viewers made from old hair roller boxes and aluminum foil.

Leon Pogoler, a 65-year-old film lighting technician from Venice, joined record crowds at Mt. Wilson for his moment in the sun.

Pogoler, who was accompanied by his 18-year-old son Jason, saw the eclipse through a “telescope” fashioned from field binoculars. Over one lens he had layered three welding-goggle lenses. But the other binocular lens was left uncovered, providing enough of an opening for the concentrated sunlight to stream through, leaving a small burn on his cheek, just below his thick mustache.

“I got it right there,” he said, pointing to his semi-permanent memento.

After the sky returned to normal, some eclipse watchers wondered whether their homemade devices had provided sufficient protection for their eyes. Los Angeles’ largest emergency rooms, however, had reported no cases of unusual eye injuries as of late Thursday.

“According to the National Society to Prevent Blindness, the last major eclipse of this kind resulted in about 150 reported injuries,” said Dr. Barry A. Weissman, an associate professor of ophthalmology at UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute.

That is not a large number given how many people probably watch an eclipse, yet it is serious because any injury to the retina, or the light-collecting part of the eye, is permanent, Weissman said.

Ilea Mathias, a 17-year-old from Westerville, Ohio, who watched the eclipse at Caltech in Pasadena, knew not to take any chances.

The teen-ager recalled watching a smaller eclipse in fourth grade. The day before, her teacher had brought in a lecturer who warned that he had been partially blinded by watching an eclipse without protective eye wear.

“You could see these little crescents burned out of his eyes; it was really gross,” Mathias recalled. “That man’ll be seeing eclipses for the rest of his life.”

Caltech spokesman Robert Finn explained the danger of eclipse watching.

“People think there are these ‘Z’ rays that come out of the sun” during an eclipse, said Finn. “There are no mysterious rays. The danger occurs because people who normally aren’t captivated by the sun may be lulled into a false sense of security by this curious phenomenon because the sun is partially blocked.”

Armando Gonzalez, an 18-year-old Pasadena High School student, said his grandparents had warned him against watching the eclipse, even with protective eye gear.

“They don’t understand the logic behind it,” said Gonzalez, who is taking part in a six-week science program this summer at Caltech. “They’re superstitious and they think it’s a bad omen.”

To ancient civilization--and a few of their modern descendants--a solar eclipse is a frightening omen, signaling the displeasure of the gods, the triumph of evil, the breakdown of the natural order, explained Alan Dundes, a Berkeley folklorist.

To ward off the evil and to try to restore order, people beat drums, shot arrows at the sun, pinned dolls on their chests and hid in caves. Today, Americans run toward, not away from the sun, partly because of their more sophisticated knowledge of scientific phenomenon but also because of their peculiar love for disorder and the unnatural.

“If people hear there is a tidal wave in Santa Monica at 3:15, they’ll be lined up to watch it. . . . In a sense this is a natural disaster, even though just a metaphorical one,” Dundes said.

Like many of Hollywood’s stars, the glow from the eclipse faded quickly.

George Diaz, 21, of Fullerton took a week off from his job with a delivery service to prepare to photograph the eclipse at Griffith. But afterward, he and a friend, Michael Batiste, 20, of Fullerton planned to head for the beach.

“This is a day we’ve dedicated to the eclipse, not to girls,” Diaz said. “But after the eclipse, I’m going to shoot pictures of girls.”

Times staff writers Bill Billiter, John Chandler, Aaron Curtiss, Philipp Gollner, Denise Hamilton, Amy Kazmin, John Lee, Joanna Miller and Phil Sneiderman contributed to this story.