LONDON.- Depictions of eclipses in art and literature reveal that there were 'intriguing occasions when the artistic eye has been of real utility to the scientific process,' according to a paper by Ian Blatchford, Director of the Science Museum, which shows how art and science are part of the same culture.

Although the advent of photography would solve a number of scientific puzzles about eclipses, artists played 'a surprisingly important role' in understanding this heavenly phenomenon until relatively recently, Blatchford argues in an article Symbolism and Discovery: eclipses in art published this week in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, a few days before the shadow of an eclipse will race across central Africa.

Representations of eclipses in Western art are 'culturally fascinating and surprising,' not least because artists could respond to this heavenly phenomenon both spiritually and rationally, remarks Blatchford, who is an art historian by background.

The Science Museum's extensive collections of guides, models and pamphlets show how tracking and observing eclipses became a fad in the early nineteenth century as scientific observations became more detailed. Yet, says Blatchford, 'the artist remained a valued part of the professional eclipse expedition.'

One example are the 'glorious chromolithographs' of a total eclipse in Wyoming in 1878, produced by Etienne Trouvelot which are remarkably faithful when compared with 'accurate' composite images produced by modern digital photography.

American Howard Russell Butler was invited to paint the 1918 eclipse by the US Naval Observatory and helped to confirm the growing consensus among researchers that a luminous area encircling the darkened body of the Sun—the corona—was the Sun's atmosphere. 'For a long time it was thought the corona was part of the moon's atmosphere,' explains Blatchford.

Blatchford's richly-illustrated paper was based on a talk given at an 'eclipse festival' to coincide with the last solar eclipse visible in the UK, in March 2015, organised by Giles Harrison, Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Reading University, who said that eclipses have played a key role in the history of science.

The Science Museum is planning a major exhibition about the Sun in 2018. Blatchford said it is remarkable how this central feature of everyday life has been neglected in modern culture.