U.S. Observation team
,
Oregon, in 1918. The path of the eclipse clipped
Washington state, and then moved across the whole of Oregon through the rest of the country, exiting over
Florida. The
U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) obtained a special grant of $3,500 from Congress for a team to observe the eclipse in
Baker City,
Oregon. The team had been making preparations since the year before, and John C. Hammond led the first members to Baker City on April 11. The location was important, as it influenced the probability of cloud cover and the duration and angle of the sun during the eclipse. The team included
Samuel Alfred Mitchell as its expert on eclipses, and
Howard Russell Butler, an artist and physicist. In a time before reliable colour photography, Butler's role was to paint the eclipse at totality after observing it for 112.1 seconds. He noted later that he used a system of taking notes of the colours using skills he had learned for transient effects.
Observation As the total eclipse approached, the team watched as clouds obscured the Sun. The clouds did clear, but during their most important observations the Sun was covered by a thin cloud; the Sun was completely visible five minutes later. Following the 1915 prediction of
Albert Einstein's
General theory of relativity that light would be deflected when passing near a massive object such as the Sun, the USNO expedition attempted to validate Einstein's prediction by measuring the position of stars near the Sun. The cloud cover during totality obscured observations of stars, though, preventing this
test of the validity of general relativity from being completed until the
solar eclipse of May 29, 1919. == Eclipse details ==