The ship docked at Aruba long enough for the passengers who intended to watch from shore to exit, then at 10:00 we steamed out for the centerline. The captain was determined to give us the best seat on the planet for viewing, so he took advantage of the assembled experts on board to plan the thing. According to reliable reports, he had 20 people in a conference room feeding him ideas, including several people who had been at more than 10 eclipses, several planetarium and observatory directors, and the Astronomer Royal of England. They came up with the following plan:
1) Try for clear skies. Since the ship can download weather satellite pictures in real time, this is not a terribly difficult thing to do with a few hours to maneuver.
2) Get as close to the centerline of the eclipse as possible. Again, with GPS navigation, not a problem.
3) Cruise downwind to keep the wind across the deck to a minimum. Trade winds run about 20kt all day, and the ship can make another 20kt. Into the wind, it's enough to blow all the telescopes overboard.
4) Don't cr uise completely downwind, otherwise the smoke will obscure everyone's view.
5) Go fast enough to make the stabilizers effective to minimize rolling, but slow enough to prevent engine vibration from shaking the cameras.
This was a great plan, except that there was a small squall line between us and the clear skies. I was camped out on the stern to avoid the wind, but I hear that the people who had carefully taped their telescopes to the deck in the bow, only to watch the ship heading right towards some nasty rain, were thinking about performing the first keel-hauling in the history of the Princess line.
Fortunately the Captain was worried about exactly the same thing. We made a sharp turn parallel to the rain, found a location where it was very light, and punched through with just a few drops on deck. If you want to see something impressive, you've got to experience a sharp turn at 20kt in a 70,000 ton ocean-going vessel. We did about a 10-degree bank even with the stabilizers running. I'm sure we lost a few strawberry daquiris off the starboard decks.
As we cruised towards centerline, we picked up a few hitchhikers going the same direction. They weren't quite able to keep up with our 20kt speed, but they stayed in sight for about 5 minutes. I suspect they were on the economy eclipse tour; cost is substantially less, but you have to swim out to the centerline yourself.
Everyone on board had been issued "eclipse glasses", paper glasses with aluminized mylar lenses which cut the light down enough to look directly at the sun safely. At first contact (when the moon first touches the sun), the eclipse glasses all came out for a few minutes, then back to the strawberry daquiris for an hour until things picked up again.
After most the the sun was obscured, we started playing pinhole-camera games. If you project the
light of the partially obscured sun through any convenient pinhole, you can get a nice crescent
shaped image. Trees are great for this -- each shaft of sunlight through the leaves creates another
crescent on the ground.We were severely treeless on board ship, but made do with holes punched
in paper. Naturally, one needs to take this to extremes and create patterns of pinholes.
Things don't actually get weird during an eclipse until just a few minutes before totality. This first weird thing is that it starts getting cooler. Some times as much as 20F cooler. The second weird thing is that the world gets dark in a strange way. When the sun goes down in the evening, the sky changes to interesting shades of red as the light is filtered through thousands of miles of dust-laden air. During an eclipse, it stays exactly the same color, there's just a lot less of it. This seems completely wrong in an undefineable way.Another weird thing is that animals start to realize something is wrong; birds stop singing, cows cluster in the corner of the field, and so on. Fish, apparently, just don't care very much.
Another thing odd about an eclipse is that there's a sound track. Imagine the sound of 2000 people going "Ooooooh" all at once, followed by hundreds of camera shutters and auto-winders going off. The veteran eclipse watchers reminded everyone with idiot-proof cameras to turn off (or tape up) their electronic flashes when photographing the eclipse.The camera's little idiotic brain will decide that the main subject is far too black and try to add some fill flash to get a good exposure. Almost certainly, none of the flashes are powerful enough to light up the dark side of the moon, but they will ruin everyone's dark-adaptation.
Here's three pictures I took of totality. I'll have to point out, however, that they are not even close to the original. Firstly, they were taken with fairly fast film through a shorter-than-optimal lens since I didn't want ship motion to blur them too badly, secondly they were dropped onto a photo-CD which drops the contrast ratio even further, and thirdly they were compressed into JPEG format for a further loss of definition. But, of course, photographing eclipses is pretty much doomed from the start, since the film only has about 1 200-to-1 contrast ratio, trying to capture something that has a 100,000-to-1 brightness ratio. Go to an eclipse some time and see what I mean.
The tour agencies on board missed a great opportunity after totality was over (3 minutes, 14 seconds at our position). If they had set up tables for reservations for the next eclipse, they could have signed every one of us up right there. Taken our American Express cards and everything. As it was, the ones who were smart got names and addresses. The interesting one will be in August 1999; it starts in the Atlantic, hits the very southern tip of England, northern France, south/central Germany, exits into the Black Sea somewhere around Bulgaria, crosses Turkey and Iran. It's hard to tell which is the best place to be: Germany would be nice, but the weather isn't the best. Some of the tour agencies are thinking another cruise, this time in the Black Sea. The dedicated astronomers will be in Turkey or Romania for maximum totality and best weather.
Why?
P.R.
Ship
USVI
Dominica
Grenada
Astro
L.G.
Eclipse
Aruba
Bday
Buzz
