Science and politics never mix…however science transcends
political boundaries and ultimately prevails…but not without some intrigue. Alas,
even the eclipse in 1991 had a bit of intrigue. As I designed the experiment
which will image the corona in white light during the 2017 eclipse, I am
reminded of a similar collection of data I took at the 1991 eclipse. My Russian
colleagues were very interested in my CCD data. I offered them a disk with the
images on it at our ‘after the eclipse going away party’. As we laughed and
enjoyed great company amount new found friends and colleagues, one of the
Russian scientists became very quiet and pensive. He was concerned about the
data on the computer disk and how he would get it back to Russia. Because
Russia was a communist country and all the science equipment had to be
carefully accounted for and the fact that it had to go from Russia to Cuba then
to Mexico for the eclipse…the data disk was not on the manifest. Going through three
layers of security from Mexico to Cuba then back to Russia posed a potential
security problem. If found the disk might be construed as some nefarious international
spy plot. What to do? After about 3 seconds of thought the scientist said the
equivalent of “the hell with it” and hid the disk deep in his duffle bag! The
data and scientist did make it back to Russia and a paper was published using
my data. Here’s the intro from that paper:
The full paper can be found
at
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1995AN....316...23K&db_key=AST&page_ind=0&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_VIEW&classic=YES
