Abstract
THE land path of the line of the total eclipse of the sun commences from a little south of Ratnagiri, on the Bombay coast, and runs in a north-easterly direction to Nepal, passing nearly over Mount Everest, and then disappears in Thibet. The shadow of the moon will therefore pass through parts of the Bombay Presidency, through Hyderabad, Berars, Central Provinces, and parts of Central India, Bengal, and North-west Provinces. The length of the path through India is about a thousand miles, and the width of the shadow roughly fifty miles. Hence the area from which observations could be taken is enormous. In India, however, facilities for travelling simply do not exist at all over by far the greater part of the country; and as accommodation for European travellers is even more scanty than the means of transport, the number of stations from which observations of the forthcoming eclipse are likely to be made is much smaller than would be expected. As the duration of the total phase of the eclipse on the central line decreases from about two minutes ten seconds on the Bombay coast, to about one minute forty seconds in parts of Bengal and the North-west Provinces, the natural tendency will be for observers to prefer the western stations. In addition, too, it would appear that the meteorological conditions are more favourable at the western than at the eastern or central stations on the line of totality.
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Stations for Observing the Total Eclipse of the Sun in January 1898. Nature 56, 424–425 (1897). https://doi.org/10.1038/056424b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/056424b0