Hide and Seek : Weather Conspires Against Would-Be Astronomers Viewing Partial Eclipse

It took a huge leap of faith for Adriana Zoppo to climb the Hollywood Hills before dawn Friday. An astronomical one, in fact.

After all, Los Angeles had been socked in by nearly a week of cloudy morning weather. And forecasters had warned that “fog will continue to stream into the Southland” on Friday morning.

But a partial solar eclipse was predicted to occur at sunrise and Zoppo wanted to see it. So the Van Nuys woman crossed her fingers and rushed to the Griffith Observatory.

About a dozen others were there when she and a friend, Caesar Chicco of Burbank, stepped onto the observatory roof. The mood was almost as heavy as the bank of clouds covering the eastern sky over distant Mt. Wilson.

“I got up at 4 and looked out the window and saw the clouds and thought to myself: ‘This is not good,’ ” said Ed Krupp, director of the city-run observatory, which had planned a public viewing of the eclipse. “But we had to come up here. It’s our job.”

Frances Barron, a telecommunications analyst from Thousand Oaks, stood next to a telescope that observatory worker David Copeland had aimed toward the clouds. She had awakened her 11-year-old twin daughters, Char and Jackie, at 4 a.m. for the trip into the city.

“As we drove in and saw the clouds, I said: ‘Oops,’ ” Barron recalled.

Sharon Friedman, a telemarketer from Montrose, tried to look on the bright side. Dawn was painting the downtown high-rises in gentle pink and purple hues a few miles south of the observatory. “This is beautiful,” she told her husband, Joel.

The sunrise was at 5:49 a.m., but observatory workers calculated that it would take another 11 minutes for the sun to climb from behind Mt. Wilson. The rooftop crowd waited silently.

There was disappointment when clouds blocked the sun’s appearance. At 6:03 a.m., some spectators were putting away the plastic sun-viewing filters they had brought when a shout suddenly went up.

“It’s emerging!” yelled Clay Palmer, an engineer from Ventura.

Sure enough, the sun was slowly lifting past a narrow break in the clouds. Its upper left side--the part obscured by the moon to create the eclipse--gradually came into view.

“It looks like a piece of cheese with a bite out of it,” said Char Barron, peering through Copeland’s telescope.

Daniel Berghoff, a contractor from the Pico-Robertson area, sketched comparisons of the sun at 6:05 and 6:10 a.m. The cheese bite was getting smaller; it would disappear by 6:23, explained the more knowledgeable astronomy buffs.

But the sun disappeared behind the clouds again before that could happen. The rooftop crowd began drifting away.

“We were lucky. There was a window of opportunity for us to look through,” said Saul Gitomer, a pharmaceutical consultant visiting from Kansas City, Mo.

“It was worth coming down here for,” said Brian Reed, a college science student from Canyon Country.

“It was great,” decided the observatory’s Krupp.

Adriana Zoppo, a concert violinist, lingered a few more minutes.

“I think I saw it. I think it was in the upper left, but I’m not sure,” she told Chicco, a fellow musician. “I’m no astronomer. The sun started disappearing and then, bing, there it went.”

An eclipse eclipsed.