Several people are off to various parts of the world (particularly North Africa) to get into position for a good view of Wednesday's total solar eclipse. Here's a shot of that ol' devil moon getting in the way of the sun back in 1999. (I got it from Wikipedia):
It should be fun! I saw my first such event in the South of England on August 11th, 1999 and it was fantastic. The path of totality just grazed the tip of Portland Bill, in [strike]Devon[/strike] Dorset, where we were, which was a better bet (traffic-wise) than going into Cornwall (see picture I got from Nasa's site showing the European trajectory from that event). I'll never forget the two most dramatic things about it for me. One was the silence. All the birds stopped chirping (maybe they thought it was time to sleep?) and it was very peaceful all of a sudden. The other was the astonishing sight of the shadow of the moon rushing toward you over the ocean with a sort of terrifying speed. ("And darkeness fell across the earth", you almost hear a booming voice say in your head.) Nobody seems to describe that latter effect when you hear about eclipses, but to me that was a most wonderful aspect. Two of our regular readers, Amara Graps (I think) and also the person who goes by the identifier "chimpanzee" have gone off on trips for this purpose. Amara to Turkey and chimpanzee to the Egypt/Libya border. Very intrepid. Chimpanzee seems to have taken some impressive optical equipment with him, not to mention a wisely chosen robust laptop (rather like mine) from which to blog about his eclipse-chasing endeavours, involving fun-looking off-road vehicles and the like. You can check in to his two blogs on his adventures here and here, the latter being primarily a photo gallery. (Last time I looked there were interesting mechanical challenges to be surmounted......) I'm hoping that chimpanzee and Amara might check back here later and tell us about their travels and the event. Here's Nasa's website on the various solar eclipses coming up this year. -cvj
