shadow of the moon

[julesjones]

One of the other space news items on my flist this week was the total solar eclipse, which got a lot of news coverage because it was both one of the longest eclipses in centuries, and crossed a lot of large cities. As a result, people have been discussing their experiences of other eclipses. Here's my report on seeing totality in the 1999 solar eclipse. (It's on the part of my website that hasn't been updated to new and shiny CSS yet.) Ten years, and reading that report still puts me back on that moor that day. It's not an experience you easily forget.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's so not fair. Harry and I went down into Cornwall, to my mother's, and saw ... precisely nothing. Cloud so solid that it was hard even to register a change in light levels. *sulks*

(And m'friends Mark and Helen are even now in Japan, having chased this one that far. *sulks again*)

[tanngrisnir.livejournal.com]

I was in Cornwall too; a bunch of us went on a special train from Glasgow, which took 12 hours to get to Penzance (arriving 06:00), we had twelve hours in Cornwall, then the return journey...

Some of us went to St. Erth, and then up Trencrom Hill, where we got drenched (heavy cloud cover, turn off the sun -> torrential rain, of course). We might not have seen the eclipse itself, but we did have a superb view over the Cornwall peninsula, black on a sort of yellow-green sea, with flashbulbs twinkling everywhere, and it was a pretty fantastic experience despite the sodden clothes and lack of any sight of the sun.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

My brother took his daughter and his partner to Germany, where I think the weather was rather better. He was so hooked he talked about going to Zimbabwe for the next one (when was that?) but didn't get round to it.