Eclipse Quotes

“One evening, the story goes, the two men were looking out of their laboratory window in Heidelberg at a fire raging in the nearby town of Mannheim. Curious about what might be burning, they pointed their spectroscope at the flames. They were able to detect the presence of the elements barium and strontium in the fire, whose spectra they had previously identified in their laboratory. The question struck them immediately: if they could analyse flames in Mannheim, why not the surface of the Sun?”
― J. P. McEvoy, Eclipse: The Science and History of Nature's Most Spectacular Phenomenon