Gawking San Diegans Prove That the Sun Is Indeed a Star

Eclipse-mania took over San Diego County on Thursday, and while thousands of spectators gazed skyward with pinhole cameras made of virtually anything--a rainbow-sprinkled doughnut, in one case--others saw the planetary extravaganza as an opportunity to make a buck.

About 1,500 people thronged around the entrance to San Diego’s Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater and Science Center for a once-in-a lifetime, two-hour, 39-minute show as the moon cruised across 74% of the sun, suddenly dropping the temperature and diffusing the light.

“There really is no way to describe it. It’s just awesome,” said Troy Parkins, 21, who trekked from Davis to see the eclipse and sported a black T-shirt reading “Total Eclipse.”

Elsewhere, throughout the downtown, office workers flowed onto the sidewalks and stood in doorways and atop buildings, fidgeting with makeshift pinhole cameras that allowed viewers to watch indirectly the moon’s motion rather than risk eye damage by peering at the sun.

Virtually everything was turned into a looking device as holes were pricked in the side of boxes, business cards and paper cups, and 600-millimeter camera lenses were hooked up to video recording equipment. Invention was all around.

“I was just eating it, and all of a sudden, I realized that the doughnut has a hole and that would work,” said Jonathan Lipsher, a UC San Diego student, who witnessed the eclipse at the science center by holding his multicolored sprinkled doughnut up to the sun, its pink glaze slowly melting, and observing the eclipse’s image cast upon the ground.

Others used more expensive, but no more effective, means of viewing the eclipse.

“It’s a $10, glorified milk carton,” said Lisa Dyment, 30, who had bought a spiffy “Solar Eclipse Kit” from an environment-oriented gift shop in Horton Plaza that was, essentially, an 8-inch-long cardboard box.

“As far as us amateurs are concerned, it’s just an aesthetic thing. It’s just a neat event,” said Greg Cade, an air traffic controller at Lindbergh Field and a member of the San Diego Astronomy Assn.

Inside the Space Center, hundreds of people jammed around monitors that fed live coverage of the full eclipses seen in Hawaii and Baja California, letting out a tremendous shout as the moon covered the sun completely.

By Wednesday night, the center had sold out its stock of 7,000 special safety glasses used to watch the event directly, a spokeswoman said, leaving hundreds of spectators disappointed when they arrived at the center early Thursday.

Phil Korngold took advantage of the shortage of the aluminum-coated Mylar glasses.

“A quarter a look, anyone?” Korngold, 32, shouted as he waded through the slow-moving lines of people waiting to take a free peek through one of several telescopes.

“A lot of people kept coming up and asking me, ‘Can I look, can I look?’ so I thought, what the heck.” he said, waving about the pair that he had bought from another spectator for $6.

But selling the glasses turned out to be more profitable, and, by the end of the eclipse, Korngold had bought and sold four of the cardboard-framed glasses, which retailed for $2.29, for a total profit of $40.

“I’m majoring in business management,” said the San Diego State University student. “How am I doing?”

Korngold won’t get another opportunity quite like this one for another 37 years, when the next partial eclipse can be seen in San Diego County. But an eclipse of the magnitude that dimmed the Southland on Thursday won’t happen for another 500 years, according to center spokeswoman Mary Hettinger.

She said, “The only thing that’s been anything like this was in August, 1989, when the Voyager flew by Neptune and we had live (videos) from that.”

Martha Herrersa, who made the pilgrimage to the center with her 16-month-old daughter Mallory in tow, said “I want to be able to tell her that we came, because I don’t know if I’ll be here to make the next one, but she probably will.”

Not everybody was so awed by the experience.

“I was expecting it to get real, real dark, but it’s not,” shrugged a less-than-impressed Hunter Eitel, 8, who came from Temecula with his Cub Scout troop.

In front of one downtown bank building, dozens of people in business attire took turns putting on a welder’s helmet to get a glimpse of the eclipse.

Pacific Bell Telephone employees stood fascinated as the sun’s reflection moved slowly across their building’s exterior. The reflection was from a mirror on a motorcycle parked nearby.

In more remote areas of the county, such as Pine Valley, large groups of people gathered where normally there would be only cactus in order to get a cloud-free view. More than 150 people at the Palomar Mountain Observatory were disappointed, however, when they found out that the center’s dome would not be open for the eclipse.

Times staff writer Greg Johnson contributed to this story.