Reflections on the Total Eclipse of the Sun

So it happened.

Hordes of peo­ple cov­ered the beaches. The moon cov­ered the sun. And the clouds cov­ered the eclipse.

But only for a minute or so. In the end, we had a clear view of the total solar eclipse in Far North Queens­land for one of the two min­utes of total­ity. Did it live up to the expec­ta­tions that led me to go on my Nerdtrip in the first place?

Firstly let me just say that I had my doubts about a total eclipse that took place so soon after sun­rise; so close to the hori­zon. But – oh boy – it was a sen­sa­tional and fit­ting warm-up act. The sun is a glow­ing, bul­bous orb when viewed through so much sky and atmos­phere. As I inad­e­quately cap­tured with my point’n’shoot.

The clouds hov­ered and threat­ened our van­tage point on Port Dou­glas beach from first light, but as the moon began mov­ing across the face of the sun my trav­el­ling buddy Ken and I were able to clearly see the begin­ning of the eclipse.

Every­one around us on the beach had long-necked cam­eras on tripods and spe­cial eclipse-observing glasses. But not us. We had our own sci­en­tific equip­ment – a card­board poster tube with a pair of binoc­u­lars sticky-taped to the top that pro­jected the sun onto a big piece of white cardboard.

We were the DIY nerds of the eclipse, bring­ing sci­ence and sticky tape together. Here I am with our astro­nom­i­cal contraption.

It may not look like much but it did a pretty good job of show­ing us the eclipse as it happened.

I was fas­ci­nated to see how dark the world would be with the sun was com­pletely obscured. And I had to wait a while as the dark­ness didn’t show up until the eclipse was almost total.

It turns out more than 80% of the sun needs to be cov­ered before a dif­fer­ence in the light can be noticed. I took some bad video of the cou­ple of min­utes lead­ing up to total­ity that shows things get­ting dark. Keep an eye out for Venus, which reap­pears in the dark sky (at the top of the screen) once total­ity hits.

We thought we were out of luck as total­ity struck when the clouds had over­taken the sun. But right after the above video fin­ishes the clouds got out of the way and we saw the total eclipse in all its glory.

And it was glorious.

This is the best image of it that I man­aged to capture.

But that photo doesn’t really con­vey what it was like to wit­ness the eclipse. It also didn’t look like the stun­ning pho­tos on the inter­net that look like this…

In truth, what we saw looked more like this…

For me this lat­ter image (a beau­ti­ful piece of work that I must credit to AAP and pho­tog­ra­pher Brian Cassey) sums up exactly what was so spec­tac­u­lar about the eclipse. And why it totally met my expectations.

Because it wasn’t just about one plan­e­tary body mov­ing in front of another. It was about being on Earth and see­ing the moon, which by some fluke is the Exact Right Size and Exact Right Dis­tance Away to seem­ingly slip over the sun like a per­fect mask.

And once total­ity was over the cel­e­bra­tory drinks were pulled from eskies all along the beach front. At this point the day was still younger than 7am.

It’s been a month since the eclipse now. And every time I’ve looked up and seen the moon since I’ve thought of it dif­fer­ently. With a renewed admiration. Because it per­formed this mirac­u­lous feat of shut­ting down the sun – the goliath cen­tre of our solar sys­tem – if only for a few minutes.

It was a hell of a show. Earth’s lit­tle pock­marked satel­lite has a def­i­nite, if irreg­u­lar, flair for show­biz. The evi­dence was in all the cheer­ing that took place on the beaches of Far North Queens­land early one morn­ing last November.

I couldn’t have been hap­pier with Nerdtrip 2012. And I’m already look­ing for­ward to the next total solar eclipse to take place in Aus­tralia – Syd­ney 2028.

My one tip for that eclipse – book your accom­mo­da­tion now!