A citizen scientist validates General Relativity.

[polymath257]

Very cool:

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy...xperiment/


But, for those who do not want to read the whole article (or, part of it), here's the first paragraph:

And, an image:

I find it utterly impossible to believe this experiment was not successfully performed emany times, either directly or incidentally, in the intervening 100 years.

If that were indeed the case, then eddington’s original experiment would have been dismissed as a fluke.

Also, distinguishing a positional difference of 1.7 arc seconds is not trivial with amateur equipment and i wonder whether it was relativity or wistfulness that underlie this particular observation.

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Variants of this experiment have been done. For example, we have measured the deflection of radio waves going past the sun from quasars and timing delays from other radio waves.

But the observation during an eclipse is both very tricky and requires the eclipse to happen when the sun (in the sky) is close to a bright enough star whose position is known *precisely*. That 1.7 second of arc is incredibly hard to measure unless there are other stars in the field of view so you can compare 'eclipse pics' with 'not eclipse pics' to pick up the deflection. Even small distortions from the optics can wreck havoc with this measurement.