Even a Partial Eclipse Leaves Folks Totally Awed in O.C.

Thousands of Orange County residents on Thursday streamed outdoors for a glimpse of one of nature’s most awesome shows this century--a midday darkening of the skies.

In a county famous for big-time amusement parks and make-believe, the partial eclipse of the sun proved that real science can also be boffo entertainment. At Cal State Fullerton, for instance, about 350 people surrounded a cluster of outdoor telescopes and peered skyward through protective viewing equipment.

“This is great!” said Nancy Kvalstad of Glendora as she watched the receding sun through special goggles at Cal State Fullerton.

Nearby, Albert Gonzalez of Santa Ana also was entranced. “I’m fascinated with this,” he said. “This is a phenomenon that everybody should witness.”

For many, the partial eclipse was education. For some, it was an impromptu party outdoors. And for others, the gathering of humans to study wonders in the sky produced atavistic stirrings--emotional links with primitive mankind’s fear of the sun’s being extinguished.

Some nervous laughs tittered at Cal State Fullerton as the moon began to blot out the sun. Trees on campus filtered the diminished sun and reflected it on the ground as crescent-shaped patterns of light--just like the crescent of sun remaining in the sky.

“When do they sacrifice the virgins?” joked Jennie Cansler of Glendora as she watched the almost mystical events with the other spectators at Cal State Fullerton.

Cloudless skies over most of inland Orange County allowed unrestricted viewing. At the coast, the morning cloud cover began to break up just before the height of the eclipse.

At 11:28 a.m., the peak of the eclipse, 69% of the sun was obscured, creating an eerie, twilight-like condition at what normally is the brightest time of day. Temperatures dipped as the sun grew dimmer. At Cal State Fullerton, the outdoor temperature dropped from 88 degrees at 10:30 a.m. to 81 degrees at 11:30 a.m.

In other parts of the world, including Baja California and the Big Island of Hawaii, thousands made pilgrimages to watch a total eclipse of the sun.

About 560 Americans, many of them from Orange County, congregated at a cow pasture near the Mexican town of Santa Cruz in southern Baja California on Thursday morning. As all but the sun’s corona was blocked out at 11:47 a.m., the temperature dropped from 95 to 75 degrees. The sky darkened from clear blue to a stunning deep turquoise.

“It was as if the sun were setting in all four corners of the world,” said Eric Neilson, a carpenter from Buena Park. “There was no sun above us, but a sunset all around us.”

“I didn’t want it to end, but I knew there was nothing I could do to make it last longer,” said Linda Crowe, a property manager from Anaheim. “I want to do another eclipse as soon as possible.”

“It’s the highest form of theater,” said Yorba Linda resident Barbara Hammerman, a theater director. “I believe if more people could see this kind of magical natural event, they would take better care of the Earth.”

The eclipse posed serious dangers for those who looked at the sun without special protective glasses.

“When the sun begins to get covered up by the moon, then many people think, ‘Oh, it’s not bright any more, so I can stare at it,’ ” said Jeff Cady, staff physicist at Cal State Fullerton and an organizer of the eclipse-watching event there. “But actually you’re still getting nasty ultraviolet and infrared radiation that is extremely dangerous. You don’t feel it. You don’t know it. But you could go home--and go blind.”

Officials at UCI Medical Center said that no one came in Thursday with an eye injury related to the eclipse. Doctors noted that the news media for several days have been spreading warnings to the public about the dangers of looking at the eclipse without protective eye wear.

Nonetheless, some ophthalmologists, including Dr. James R. Brinkley of Laguna Hills, on Thursday worried that some people in Orange County were harming their retinas by looking at the sun with unsafe or defective eye wear.

“I checked with the American Academy of Ophthalmologists, and I found that in the 1970 eclipse, 140 persons on the East Coast injured their eyes, and about half of those were people who thought they were using protective material,” said Brinkley, an associate professor of ophthalmology at USC. “It’s possible that some people hurt their eyes today.”

He added that he had advised people not to look at the sun “even with something you think is protective” because of the possibility of flaws in it. “My advice was only to look at the eclipse indirectly,” he said.

One of the most common protective glasses, a cardboard-framed product with Mylar-coated lenses called “Eclipse Glasses,” were sold by telescope stores. Several Orange County stores reported phenomenal business for the past three days.

“It’s been a madhouse,” said Joe Klotchman, manager of Scope City, a telescope store in Costa Mesa. “On Wednesday night we had people lined up in one of those long lines like you see at the opening of a hit movie.”

At The Wellington, a Laguna Hills apartment complex for seniors, about 150 residents and staff gathered under blue skies to view the eclipse through Mylar glasses and to swap stories of past eclipses.

They craned their necks, gazing skyward, beyond the palm trees. As the peak of the eclipse neared, the sky fell slightly gray. It was an “eerie light,” said one observer.

Doris Miller, 94, remembered viewing her first eclipse with her family from the attic of their Nob Hill home in San Francisco, shortly after the 1906 earthquake. They first tried using opera glasses, and then smoked glass, she recalled.

“I just never thought I would see another one,” she said.

Clint Wilde, executive director of the apartment complex, recalled an eclipse in the late 1950s when he was 13 and on a Boy Scout camping trip in the woods. His most vivid memory was of how the wildflowers began to close, as if night had fallen, he said.

In North Orange County, Connie Rehagen, a reading tutor, was one of several eclipse-watchers at the Placentia Civic Center courtyard. She beamed a shadow of the eclipse so that one of her students, Albert Le, 12, could see the phenomenon going on in the skies.

George Diaz, 21, of Fullerton took a week off from his job with a package delivery service to prepare to photograph the eclipse at Griffith Observatory. But when the solar event ended, 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.”

In the village of Sleepy Hollow, near Chino Hills State Park, Dan Moore, a maintenance technician, watched the the eclipse through infrared film. “I feel like a kid again,” he said.

At Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, about 20 students from teacher Joel Levine’s astronomy class clustered in a parking lot, crowding for a glimpse of the sun refracted through pinhole boxes. Some students built homemade eclipse-viewing devices for the event.

Shane Krosby, a physics major, dashed home just before class to hastily patch together a large cardboard box with an open side. Unable to find foil or a white sheet of paper, Krosby instead poked a pinhole through a cut-up Pepsi can, which projected an image onto a white T-shirt.

“Everything physical astounds me,” Krosby said. “That’s why I’m a physics major. (A solar eclipse) is one of the big things that happens during a lifetime. That’s why I did this.”

Sondra Baker, a psychology major who said she is also a grandmother, used a sheet of paper and a pin-pricked, 3-by-5 index card. She said it was the first time she had tried to view a solar eclipse.

“I’m amazed by the rarity of it,” said Baker. “It’s nature at its most magnificent. It makes people seem so small.”

Times staff writer Susan Christian contributed to this report from Santa Cruz, Mexico. Correspondents Leslie Earnest, Ted Johnson and John Penner contributed from Orange County.