1974, Walpole/Albany, West Australia

1974, Walpole/Albany, Western Australia

Jay Pasachoff


Photos by Steve Edberg (then an undergraduate at U California, Santa Cruz; now emeritus from JPL)

Here are three pics of the horizon, the Aussie tent before and during totality and the distant ocean horizon and (at least one) star during totality. I think, with additional digging, I could find and copy to digital more images of the site. (I’m concerned that the slides may have color-drifted pink over the 46+ years since we were there.)

We set up on some grassy, rolling hills (near the top of one of them). I definitely saw stars in the gap between ocean and cloud deck, to the south, even though the slide does not show them as distinctly. I checked an atlas and determined they were the Southern Cross. The cloud deck was opaque, wiping out the view of the eclipse, itself.

2021 article by Nick Lomb about the 1974 and 1976 Australian total eclipses.