Joe Rao is Space.com's skywatching columnist, as well as a veteran meteorologist and eclipse chaser who also serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmers' Almanac and other publications.
Saturday, March 7, 1970, in Perry, Florida, more than half a century ago, a tiny timber town's day in the sun was spoiled by a dense overcast that obscured a long-awaited total eclipse of the sun that more than 25,000 people had come to see.
At noon on eclipse day, they set up their various instruments in a tobacco field, where they watched the southwest sky change from gray to pink and then to violet-gray as the moon's shadow rushed in. They saw Baily's beads and the scarlet solar chromosphere and the whitish solar corona, brighter than a, as well as irregularities in the moon's dark edge against the brilliant corona. As totality ended, a yellow"diamond ring" signaled that the spectacular event was over.
Climatological records indicate little difference, from the point of view of weather from Texas to Arkansas. Throughout this area, average cloud cover in April is consistently about 60-65 percent. Clear days occur on April 8 in about 45-50 percent of the years for which records are available, and the chances of seeing the eclipsed sun at any given moment on April 8 is about 55-60 percent.
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