quote:

A total solar eclipse had to share the stage with a Category 4 hurricane today — and NOAA satellite captured it all.

quote:

In 1900 in North Carolina, a British magician captured the first-ever footage of a solar eclipse. The film, which lasts one minute and eight seconds, soon disappeared, and historians hunted for decades to track down this rare scientific marvel, to no avail. But on May 30, 2019, archivists from the British Film Institute and The Royal Astronomical Society announced the rediscovery of this monumental clip of the moon blotting out the sun. It is thought to be the oldest surviving astronomical film, according to a press release.

Although the film disappeared for over a century, archivists knew it existed thanks to an advertisement for its premiere placed in The Era, a Victorian trade paper that chronicled the events of British theaters, Bryony Dixon, the BFI’s silent film curator, wrote in an email. At least 80 percent of all films made in the early 1900s are now lost to time, Dixon says, so it was no surprise that the eclipse footage might have disappeared. “This was one of my most-wanted missing films from the early period,” she says. In 2018, when Sian Prosser, a curator at the RAS, called Dixon to ask for help identifying short footage of an eclipse, Dixon knew exactly what film had just been found.