Solar Eclipse, 29 March 2006

by Bob Jardine

After a week of foul weather (cold, clouds, rain, and hail) on a pre-eclipse bus tour of Italy, it finally started to get sunny when we moved to Athens and then boarded a ship to visit some Aegean islands and view the Eclipse (from near Rhodes). The last few days before the eclipse were all nice and sunny.

On Monday, March 27, I saw the Green Flash from the island of Mykonos. Well, it really wasn't a flash -- but the diminishing arc of the sun's edge did turn green as it shrank in the last couple of seconds, and when it winked out, it was really, really distinctly green. This was the only night that the horizon was clear enough to see a good sunset.

March 29 dawned with some high clouds here and there, but things looked good. It did cloud up significantly, with lots of scattered dark ugly clouds in the hour or two before the eclipse, but a lot of that eventually disappeared, and it was mostly clear for the eclipse itself.

For some, the weather worry was overshadowed by the appearance of an unmarked military helicopter that buzzed the ship that morning. Since we weren't all that far from some "interesting" places in the world, some people were not happy with this appearance; we didn't know whether these were the good guys or the bad guys, but the helicopter moved off (perhaps to check out the other cruise ships in the area). When it didn't return, we slowly relaxed.

The eclipse itself was awesome. I viewed the partial stages with Coronado BinoMites (10X25 with built-in filters) and viewed totality with Canon image stabilized 15X50 binocs. I think these were about the perfect instruments, as the Corona nearly filled the Canon's FOV (about 4.5 degrees?).

The Corona was very asymmetric, as expected near solar minimum, with huge long extensions East and West, and much shorter "hairy" or "brush-like" pieces to the North and South. There were two very obvious prominences on on the East and NorthEast sides of the Sun just after second contact, and these slowly gave way to a bunch (3 or 4 at least) of prominences on the West side as totality progressed. The prominences were extremely deep, bright red. The 3rd contact "diamond ring" was huge and long-lasting.

It was a very impressive eclipse, and the helicopter did not return.

Posted on sf-bay-tac Apr 02, 2006 22:06:10 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.4 Apr 02, 2006 22:31:48 PT

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