The big day!

After an overnight stay at the Clare Valley Motel we motored on to Ceduna - this was basically an all day drive - Ceduna is 800km (500 miles) from Adelaide and not much less from Clare. Justin, our bus driver handled it perfectly and got us to our motel on the seafront at Ceduna early in the evening with a bit over 24 hours to go before the eclipse. This gave us the opportunity to see the sunset and to work out where in the sky we would need to be looking the next day.

This investigation showed that the balcony directly adjacent to our motel room had an excellent view of the spot where totality would occur, so if the esplanade was too crowded we had an alternative viewpoint. It turned out not to be necessary. Initial estimates suggested that as many as 30,000 people would turn up for the eclipse - this is some 10 times the normal population! In fact estimates of the actual attendance varied from 8 to 10 thousand, so it wasn't too crowded at all.

The following day some of our team went to visit the radio-telescope a short way inland. I gave that a miss and spent some time looking around Ceduna, soaking up the carnival style atmosphere that prevailed throughout the town. Two things were notable however. Firstly it was extremely windy, and secondly there was a lot of cloud in the sky. Some of the locals were complaining about the cold, but being English I still thought it was quite pleasantly warm!

Given that we had a few hours until the eclipse, and a bus with driver at our disposal, there was the opportunity to "run". A Council of War was duly called and the options and arguments were meted out. In essence, the information from Damien, our resident weatherman, was that anywhere that promised better weather was too far away, our odds of seeing totality were 50/50, but likely to improve during the day, and that anywhere within reach on the line of totality offered no better probability. We decided to stay in Ceduna for better or worse.

There was enormous trepidation during the afternoon. There seemed to be no let up with the wind, and the cloud cover seemed to increase. A group of those with telescopes relocated themselves to the side of our motel, effectively using the building as a windbreak. This didn't, of course, help the cloud situation. That required intervention of a more divine nature.

As afternoon became evening things did seem to improve a fair bit, although we still reckoned there was over 50% cloud cover. At 1840 local time a look at the sun through eclipse glasses revealed that it had a tiny nick in the bottom left hand corner. The moon was making its presence known!

During the partial phase various things happened. Firstly the temperature dropped noticeably, probably five degrees or so. Due to the fact that it happens so gradually one is not necessarily conscious of the fact that it is getting dark - the eye can keep pace with the change. A look at my camera's exposure meter gave the game away though - these were far from being normal "daylight" exposures! The quality of the light was also quite bizarre - most notably shadows took on a very sharp outline giving the light a very hard quality. This is unsurprising when it is considered that eclipse light is exactly the same intensity as full sunlight, just coming from a smaller part of the sky. But it is strange nevertheless.

My photographic strategy was as follows:-

Video Camera - on tripod with solar filter. Get day's events etc then fit filter and get snippets of the stages of partiality. Close to totality remove filter, replace at diamond ring and continue for some while after third contact.

Still Camera - some crowd shots and anything of technical interest. No shots during totality as I wished to see this eclipse directly, not through the viewfinder of my SLR!

This is what I did with one variation. I'm afraid it went completely against every instinct to have a once in a lifetime event in front of me and an SLR hanging around my neck, so I quickly rattled off a couple of shots in mid-totality. I'm glad I did because they turned out very nicely and having a wide-angle lens fitted, they give a very different perspective on the whole scene.

The video worked superbly. The pictures were fine, and I think I got the timing about right on the removal and refitting of the filter, which incidentally I made that afternoon out of half an eclipse glass, some card and some stickyback plastic! Some say I could have shown more of the diamond rings at each end, but I think that would only have caused the exposure system to shutdown and miss a lot of the corona - maybe I'll try a different strategy in Egypt!

The key thing with the video was the soundtrack. I didn't have any external microphones with me, so I just had to let the camera pick up the sound of whatever was going on around it. This worked very well indeed - the atmosphere was superb with various bits and pieces of commentary and banter being picked up followed by a huge collective "Woo-hoo" as totality arrived followed by the expected comments of "that was amazing" and "when's the next one?" after totality had gone.

After the eclipse we saw another phenomena - the crescent of the still partially eclipsed Sun was projected onto our hotel through the trees giving rise to some very odd shadows.

After that the stories came out in the bar… There was the Restaurant Manageress who didn't get out to see the eclipse because she had seven customers waiting to be served (What??).

The clouds came over again and we missed the final spectacle of the sun setting still partially eclipsed, but it didn't matter because we saw what we came for.

 

The question is where and when? The next possibility is the Annular eclipse in Scotland on May 31st 2003. That would be interesting as I've now seen both Partial and Total Solar eclipses, as well as Partial and Total Lunar eclipses, but I really want to see another Total Solar one.

The next one is on November 23rd 2003, but it's only visible in Antarctica, and then only in some of the less accessible parts of the continent. There are aircraft flights available at great cost where you can see the eclipse out of the window, but I'll give that one a miss I think.

The next great Total Solar Eclipse takes place on 29th March 2006 across much of Northern Africa, Turkey and Russia. The received wisdom is that the far NW corner of Egypt is the place to be on that occasion, although there's an argument that Side (p. See-day) in Turkey might also be a good venue.

Whatever, I'll be there, under the Moon's shadow at the next possible opportunity, very probably in Egypt!

 

Postscript; I went to Scotland to see the Annular Eclipse. We were fogged out :-( A pity as it would have been my Fiancee's first eclipse. Well at least she has been under the Moon's shadow! The annoyance of course is that if we'd gone up into the mountains or just done the 20 miles along the coast to Burghead, we'd have cleared enough of the fog to see at least a lot of the partial phase following annularity. I beleieve that very few people saw the annular phase itself as it was clouded or fogged out in most locations. Here's our view...