But I wonder if it actually helped the cause of confirming general relativity not to publicize this kind of visual evidence, which might have seemed to non-astronomers rather too fine-grained to be compelling. Was this is a case where not showing your working was better for all concerned?
(11/11)

Comparing that margin with the field of view in the original photograph reveals the very exacting nature of the measurements made by the expedition. Those measurements were within the range of normal astronomical practice.
(10/11)

The red arrow (I think) indicates the difference between the observed centre of the star during the eclipse and where it actually should have been (equivalent to around one-fifth of the star's width).
(9/11)

The closest illustration of the actual positional difference measured by the expedition that I can find comes via this later magnification of the photograph in the original report, showing the star kappa-1 Tauri.
(8/11)

The most famous representation of the eclipse results came in The Illustrated London News, which drew arrows indicating the direction of the displacement whilst noting that the scale of these displacements had been ‘exaggerated’ 600 times. 
(7/11)

The report also contains a graph showing how the observations of deflection broadly matched the predictions of Einstein's theory. But there is no image in the report illustrating the tiny scale of the displacement measured compared with the field of view of the eclipse photographs.
(6/11)

The expedition report, widely celebrated in the press, contains one photograph of the eclipse, with the observed positions of the proximate stars each indicated between two lines (faint on this image).
(5/11)

The expedition was not without its travails, but I think the broad consensus of those who have closely studied its results is that its measurements of displacement stand up. I'm interested, though, in the visual representation of those results.
(4/11)

So the astronomers needed to see stars clustered just to the side of the solar disk, where their light, absent the conditions of an eclipse, would normally have been obscured by the Sun's glare, and to measure the difference between the observed and actual positions of those stars.
(3/11)

As you probably know, the expedition sought to observe the gravitational displacement of starlight as a result of the curvature of space caused by the mass of the Sun, as predicted by the theory.
(2/11)

I was the last to come forward during the curtain call and received an appreciative cheer from the audience.

I can't remember how I ended up doing this. Presumably one of my friends, who was in the play, thought 'We need a body. Kendrick doesn't move or talk much....'

I think about him and his wife Saki often, partly because Saki's piano sits in my lounge. After Saki died, Mike wanted the piano to have an appreciative home. My children, meanwhile, remember him as the man with his own model train set.

Still, whatever the exact context, the photograph is interesting: two American aeronautical and astronautical pioneers, both shadowed by personal histories of affinity with fascism, getting along just fine.
(15/15)

In July 1969, Lindbergh also watched the launch of Apollo 11 from a nearby beach in the company of Jim Lovell, who had flown on Apollo 8 and would command Apollo 13.
(14/15)