1994 Total

The Story

After the disappointment of the cloudy 1991 eclipse, I decided to join Tom van Flandern's Eclipse Edge group again for the 1994 November 4 total eclipse in northern Chile. Getting there involved a couple of nights stuck in Papeete, Tahiti (no, I don't recommend it), a flying visit to Easter Island, then on to Santiago. Here I met up with the group and my companions for the trip, which included professional astrophotographer H.J.P. (Douglas) Arnold, my roommate Paul Rodriguez of the US Naval Research Labs, and Larry and Tirzah Blackman of Michigan.

The stopovers in Santiago alone were worth the trip -- it's a beautiful city with welcoming people, great food and great wine. My few days there before and after the eclipse were just enough to make me want to go back some time to see more of this picturesque country.

But back to the eclipse. On the day before the event, our group split in two. The first bunch drew the short straw -- they had to catch early morning flights to Arica, the northern-most city in Chile. We got to spend the day seeing more of the sights, then flew off in the late afternoon. Watching the sun set over the Pacific while flying along hundreds of kilometres of the spectacular Andes was breathtaking.

We arrived in Arica after dark, boarded our buses and drove to our overnight camp in the mountains. Here we found that the local army had provided a number of bivouac tents for our accommodation. Unfortunately, the morning crew, worn out by their early start, had sacked out for the night, and thoughtfully taken the spots directly inside the entrances to the tents. It was well after midnight, there was no light to see by, and none of us felt like starting a war to get somewhere to sleep. The only thing left to do was stay up the rest of the night (we had a predawn start anyway). Eclipse morning came, and we again boarded our buses and headed on to our observing site. Tom used his trusty GPS receiver to locate the correct location a few kilometres inside the edge of the eclipse path, and we were ready to set up.

Why the edge? It's a long story -- see Tom's home page for the full details. Keeping it simple, observing an eclipse from near the edge of the path is a completely different experience from sitting on the centerline. The duration of totality is reduced by a half or so, but everything else of interest -- Diamond rings, Baily's beads, seeing the chromosphere, etc -- is greatly extended. The result is a more interesting eclipse. (What's another minute of totality anyway? It all looks the same! Or so the rationale goes ... )

The morning had started with some cloud, but as the sun rose, this disappeared. Things were looking good. First contact came, and no cloud. Alas, as the sun became more covered, the temperature dropped and some thin cloud formed. Luckily, it wasn't enough to interfere too much with the view or the photographs.

One of the interesting things for me was watching Douglas Arnold preparing to photograph. Douglas has been to many eclipses, but he says he's never seen one. Watching him, I can see why. Douglas had a very fine Nikon camera, 1000mm lens, and a viewfinder more like the eyepiece on a telescope. The view through his equipment is spectacular, and during totality, he doesn't take his eye away from it. To make sure he captures as many shots of the main event as possible, he even reloads his camera with only a few minutes to go. I'm just not that brave -- one mistake reloading and it's all over till next eclipse.

The arrival of totality was spectacular. Our observing site was a few thousand meters elevation in the Atacama desert. The landscape looked like something from the Viking photos of Mars -- red dust and rock, and old watercourses. We were there entirely on our own. Our view to the west looked down the mountain slopes towards the cloudy coastline. And off in the distance we could see the shadow approaching at hundreds of kilometres per hour. In fact, since we were so close to the edge, we could clearly see the boundary between the darkness to our north and the bright sunshine to the south. In the last few seconds, I was watching the shadow zoom towards us, then race up the slopes and roll straight over the top of us. It's still the only eclipse where I've had a clear sensation of being run over by an shadow!

Time to turn around and watch the show! It took me a few seconds to pick up my jaw and remember that I was here to take some photos. Without taking my eyes off the eclipse, I took exactly the sequence of shots I'd planned for, and was ready for third contact right on time. In fact, I was a little early, but the diamond ring was early too, due to an unexpectedly deep crater at just the right spot to rob us of a few precious seconds of totality. (Heh, maybe they do count?). We were expecting around sixty seconds, but I understand it was more like 46. It felt like 20! Quite a contrast to the 270+ in Mexico.

And that was it. I took my shots of the gradual reappearance of the Sun, until the driver of the last bus threatened to leave Douglas, Paul and me behind in the desert. The drive back to Arica made us glad it'd been dark on the way up the night before. We were actually on a mountain road with some nasty dropoffs alongside us. Now we knew why we'd seen occasional shrines along the road -- every half hour or so, there was the remains of a unlucky bus below us! After the sleepless night we'd had, I found myself dozing off, hoping that our driver at least had managed to get some sleep.

I finished the trip with a few more days in Santiago, a visit to friends in Illinios, caught up with the Blackman's in Kalamazoo, a conference in California, then home. A unforgettable eclipse.

The Plan

This time I was travelling a lot lighter. My plan was to try to capture the eclipse from beginning to end on one set of 34 frames ... and it worked. If you want to see the whole thing, click on the animated GIF below. BEWARE -- it's big (440K).

Please note that totality doesn't look like what's portrayed here. What I've done is combine all of the different length exposures in the order they were taken, and none of them capture the full range of what we saw on the day. Also, the time interval between frames is not in proportion to the real events either. The main thing to note is how the point of contact ``rolled'' around the lower edge of the Sun, because of our proximity to the southern limit.

The Equipment

The photos below were taken with a Minolta X700 camera, with an Autowinder-G and a Sigma 600mm f/8 mirror telephoto lens. The exposure times are given with the photos. I haven't included the partial shots in the gallery below, but you can get an idea of what they look like from the animation above.

The Photos

I think the main things to note about these shots is how the second contact point is around 7 o'clock on the moon's limb, yet the sun reappears at around the 5 o'clock position. This is because we were very close to getting no totality at all, situated only a few kilometres inside the southern edge of the path. Also note that in every totality shot, the pink glow of the chromosphere is clearly visible. This is actually the lowest part of the Sun's atmosphere. At most eclipses, this is covered for almost the whole duration of totality. In our case, we got a very clear view of it. Lastly, the full size images show lots of Baily's beads at each end of totality, as well as some prominences on the left edge of the sun. Enjoy!

Click on any shot to see the full size image.