February 24th: We left Boston on an Air Canada flight in mid afternoon and arrived in Winnipeg at 9:00 pm local time. Once out of the jetway, we knew it was a cold place. Each step chrunched and echoed in the frozen silence. Loudly. Everywhere you looked there were clouds of ice crystals hanging in the air, refracting the light into those hazy subzero rainbows...

Our Motel

You might think from looking at the pictures of the motel that this was a relativley warm place... I mean, folks hanging out by the pool... well, it was easily -40° when we arrived and I don't think it ever got much above 0°F (-18°C) the whole time we were there...

But we were hardy scientific explorers and a little chill wasn't going to deter us from the last big eclipse seen in North America this century... no way!

February 25th: We headed out to the University of Manitoba. The Physics Department there had kindly loaned us a roof to work from. Turns out they weren't going to go up there during the eclipse.

We set up our equipment, instruments and recorders in a small utility shed on the roof. We wanted to have it all ready and checked out for the next day.

View from roof

Instrument set up

In the view from the roof you can see people walking towards the parking lot where our white (covered with road dirt) Ford van is parked. We set up the the special multiple photomultiplier instrument, four power supplies and a nice four track recorder. Well, nice for 1979. We set our detector array up inside the building with the business end pointed outward. It had electronic motors to correct its elevation and azimuth while tracking the sun and the grease in the motors would freeze.