This Dark Brightness that Falls from the Stars

Abstract

Jack Eddy was born in the country of the Pawnee Indians, in a small town in Nebraska (US), in 1931, of a modest family who would be hard put to finance the studies of their three children with the income they earned from the local farmers’ cooperative, supplemented by his mother’s salary as a primary school teacher. But Jack nevertheless gained a place in the US Naval Academy and would soon become an officer, particularly interested in what he would have to know from astronomy in order to take a sight at sea, and much more. Stationed aboard an aircraft carrier, he took part in the Korean war, but it was one night in the Atlantic, while on surveillance duty on a destroyer, that his life was suddenly turned upside-down. A man had just fallen overboard and Jack requested the order to go back and rescue him from the water. But his request was turned down, the ship continued on its way, and the drowning sailor disappeared into the dark night. Immediately, Jack the pacifist, so handsome in his officer’s white uniform, decided to leave the navy and devote his life to science, and in particular, to astronomy. Discharged from his military duties, he entered the university of Colorado, and in 1961 prepared a doctoral thesis under the supervision of an astronomer who happened to be one of the leading experts on that part of the Sun which ‘spills over’ during an eclipse, as Plutarch had noted so long before.