#1973 eclipse

[adesantis]

In June 1973, the Concorde prototype 001 took off from Las Palmas, Canary Islands, to achieve the absolute impossible: transforming a supersonic jet into a flying observatory to chase a solar eclipse.

Flying at a staggering Mach 2.05 (around 2,200 km/h) over the Sahara Desert, researchers matched the speed of the lunar shadow, stretching a brief 7-minute eclipse into 70 minutes of continuous totality.

To put that into perspective, this single legendary flight provided more total eclipse observation time than all other ground expeditions in the 20th century combined. Science fiction made reality in the twentieth century.