Newsletter 13August 1999

The Great Eclipse - A Personal Account

Images relating to this exciting event can be seen here

On August 11th 1999, the day of the long-awaited Great Solar Eclipse, my day started very early. I was staying with relatives in a suburb of Paris, and on leaving the house at 6:45AM to catch a train into Paris, I noticed to my dismay that it was heavily overcast. Were the months of intense anticipation and media hype across Europe going to end in a no-show, I wondered?

VERY POPULAR EVENT
I arrived in Paris at 7:30AM to find the station already packed with people waiting to board trains travelling north into the totality zone of the eclipse - the narrow stretch of country across which the moon's full shadow was going to race at midday. Fortunately I had already purchased a ticket to Reims (a city NE of Paris) at the suburban station earlier that morning. a;though an extra three "eclipse trains" were made available just from the station in Paris I was at, we would hear on the news later that evening that thousands failed to find transport into the totality zone.

People crammed the trains to capacity, even filling the uncomfortable aisles for the 2˝ hour journey. It was obvious that the media's popularisation of the eclipse had convinced people that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event not to be missed. Yet not only was the journey uncomfortable, but also progressively disheartening with everyone continually peering outside and seeing nothing but cloud! 'Oh well', we all thought, 'at least we will see night fall for two minutes'. I whiled the time away sending cell phone text messages to friends in South Africa - with Daryl Illbury even reading his message on air that morning.

CHAMPAGNE CITY
On arriving at Reims it was clear that TIME magazine's prediction of 500 000 visitors to the city was coming true - there were people everywhere and from every corner of the earth. What a colourful experience it was - everyone with protective eclipse glasses of all shapes and sizes and colours, small telescopes, cameras, lenses - all hoping for that elusive break in the clouds. I was convinced we wouldn't see the sun at all that day, and felt very sorry for those many people who had planned and booked this visit to Reims literally years in advance!

A MIRACLE!
I don't believe in miracles - yet there is no other way of describing what happened next. At around 12PM, for some strange reason the clouds began breaking up, and after finding the sun in the glare, we clearly saw it had a small 'bite' missing from it on the upper left - as the moon had begun to devour the sun! And right on time too - exactly as astronomers had predicted directly after the last total solar eclipse in Europe in 1927. I couldn't help thinking how odd it was that the accurate and reliable predictions of Science are hardly ever appreciated, yet the obscure nonsense spoken by "prophets" like Nostradamus continually grabs the attention of the world.

I was in the main city square, and on sighting the sun, the 8000 or so people milling around dropped everything and put on their eclipse glasses - faces turned towards the sun. The moving clouds kept obstructing the view - adding to the thrill and anticipation as we wondered how much of the eclipse we were in fact going to see! Loud cheering went up every time the clouds parted to reveal more of the moon's progress across the face of the midday sun. It was such an exciting thing to witness - the Great Eclipse was finally happening right above us! As I was on my own, I felt the need to share the excitement, so I made three international calls to friends in South Africa (only to find all three were unavailable and I had to leave high-spirited messages on their voicemail!).

NIGHT TIME
The moon continued to move across the face of the sun, fitting over it perfectly. Although the sun is 400 times wider than the moon, it is also 400 times further away from us - and due to this coincidence, on rare occasions the moon perfectly covers the sun. I was positioned next to an hotel and photographed the event with the Museum's digital camera. By placing my eclipse glasses over the lens of the camera I obtained wonderfully crisp and clear images of the eclipse. When the moon had covered about 98% of the sun, with only a thin crescent of sun being visible, I was surprised to discover that the ambient daylight had not yet dimmed - the sun was almost completely obscured, yet it was clearly still daytime! Only once the moon completely eclipsed the sun did it become dark - suddenly!

There was tumultuous cheering, shouting and whistling as this spectacularly unnatural act of Nature took place. For just over two minutes we enjoyed the night lights of Reims - bright streetlights and colourful signs on hotels, shops and fast-food stores - and extremely strange remembering that it was in fact lunch time and the middle of the day! The only disappointment for the eclipse observers at Reims was that during the two minutes of totality a small dark cloud covered the sun and we did not see the "black sun" with its surrounding corona - the cloud passed just as a thin crescent of sun began to appear on the opposite side. Nevertheless we had already seen so much more than anyone had expected, that no-one had reason to complain - it remained a most magnificent experience to be remembered for the rest of our lives.

Suddenly it was light again, and gradually, in a reversal of what had gone before, the moon moved away from before the sun.

ALIVE AT THE RIGHT TIME
Due to the fact that it crossed one of the most densely populated parts of the world (from England across to India), and because of the wide publicity it received as the last total solar eclipse of the millennium - this was the eclipse witnessed by more people than any other in history, and therefore rightly called the Great Eclipse.

On returning to Paris that afternoon I went straight to an Internet Café and sent a short e-mail message describing the event (together with two digital images of the eclipse) to everyone on my mailing list - over 300 persons, most of them in South Africa. Although I realise people outside of Europe had already seen coverage of the eclipse on TV, I again marvelled at how quickly first-hand information can be shared globally today.

Indeed, when one considers the breathtaking Hubble Space Telescope photos of the Universe that we receive almost each week, together with the extensive popularisation of events such as the Great Eclipse and the Mars Polar Lander soon to arrive on Mars in December - for those who deeply appreciate the beauties of Nature and who love to discover the secrets of the Universe, this is the greatest time of all to be alive!

Mario Di Maggio