Thoughts, ramblings and other stuff

If you are in Europe or Siberia I hope you remember there will be a solar eclipse visible tomorrow (well today by your time). Some of it will also be visible from Northern Africa and some other parts of Asia but it'll only cover less then 40% of the Sun there. It won't be total in Europe either - the totality is moving over the Arctic Ocean but the further North you live the more of the Sun will disappear. The only people who will see total eclipse are the ones living on the Faroe Islands and Svalbard. In Iceland, Greenland, Scotland, Ireland and Norway more than 90% of the Sun will be covered. In Poland it'll be about 70%. There is only 6 hours left until it starts in Poland so I hope you are ready (I mean you are probably asleep now but you should be already prepared anyway - next one so big will be in 2026).



We no longer fear it and people are more excited than anything when eclipses happened but the rise of solar energy gave media new reason to panic. It's been fun reading all those predictions of power failures, especially in Germany (7% - 18% of power in Germany comes from the Sun). It's not like they didn't had plenty of time to prepare - eclipses doesn't come by surprise. But it's fun to see the press get all worked up about it.

Tomorrow a partial solar eclipse is going to be visible in almost all of the North America and far eastern Russia and northern Japan. If you are in any of those places and it's sunny you can see it too. Eclipse calculator allows you to find a close city to see the times the eclipse is going to be visible where you are and how much of the sun is going to be covered. For me it's going to be below 40% but in northern US and Canada it can be up to 90%. So if you have something to look through (don't use sunglasses or look directly at the Sun!) it can be a pretty cool view. I use multiple layers of large overexposed and developed film but that's because they are easy to find for me. That type of film is used in biology and one can always find ones from botched experiments in the the dark room. Those are perfect. Welding mask filters and, of course, eclipse glasses work well too. I also have my camera filter I used to take pictures of the annular eclipse. Time to use it again.

I realised that I keep forgetting to post the photo evidence of my travel. I still keep sorting through thousands (literally) of photos and haven't shown it all to my own family so for now you get the part that matters the most. The rare part. The total eclipse of the sun.

I travelled all the way to the other side of the country and all the way up California to see this:


( The eclipse sequence under the cut )

The photos of the total eclipse are so smudgy because just as it happened the sky got covered by clouds and the cold wind from the ocean started to blow. It got so windy we had to catch bottles and filters I had for eclipse watching. I expected something like this, as I remember the semi-dark, sunset-like conditions with wind from my last eclipse when we went to Austria in 1999. The wind wasn't as chill but it was in a mountain valley in Alps in the middle of the day in the middle of the summer. This time it was springtime on Pacific coast (that has cold winds even on normal days as I experienced through the week) so I had a long sleeve shirt over my t-shirt on and hoodie and a rain jacket in my backpack. I spent most of the day and first hour of the eclipse overheating. When totality came it got so cold that I put all the extra clothes on.

This is how it looked like - I almost lost hope I'll get to see the best part:


I managed to see (and take photos) of some of the totality as dense clouds didn't last the whole thing. It never cleared completely but enough for me to take those photos above. It was an annular eclipse so the moon seemed a little smaller then the sun and never covered it completely leaving the 'ring of fire' around the moon. There were moments that clouds were filter enough and you could see this with your bare eyes.

After the maximum when the moon started to move away the skies cleared a little again but soon the dense fog started coming from the ocean and eventually covered everything (that's why the receding photos are so few). By the time I got back to town fog started condensing to drizzle. Nothing like sudden weather change.