Buzzing Around The World With Fellette & Doug

The sun disappeared for four minutes today...

I have never knowingly seen a total eclipse of the sun. There was much hype today and for the last few days about this event. There have been two astronomers on board giving lectures on the sun,stars and astronomy. The ship gave us handheld viewers to protect our eyes, very effective and somewhat easier than the glasses to use.


The event started about 12.30 and the sun was gone completely by about 1.45. A somewhat non-event after you take the first peek at it and see the moon creeping across the sun.

There was no noticeable change in darkness until the last few minutes. It was eerie as the darkness came so quickly after that and it became very cold, as at night.

Lots of cat calls and werewolf sounds as it went dark. It was completely covered for just under four minutes with a countdown by the expert on board over the PA when the sun would come out from behind the moon, or the moon from the sun? During that time of course you can look at it with your naked eyes and planets become visible.

There was an amazing amount of vapour trails criss-crossing the sky even though we were very far off of any airline route. We were almost midway and dead in line with Crete and Cyprus. There were also ships visible on the horizons as they lined up to be in the direct path of the eclipse that moved from Libya to Turkey at about 1056 mph.

We received two bottles of wine as an eclipse gift so we shared them with four other couples. We had to nip back and forth between cabins on port and starboard side as the captain graciously did a small amount of manoeuvring so people on each side that could not make it up top had a view. During the actual eclipse, on deck was the place to be.


We feel privileged to be here. Most photographic attempts were futile with our amateur attempts but here are a smattering to give an idea of the goings on today.

The pictures are self-explanatory except the hooded figure shown is Fellette at mid-day with the sun overhead. She had on heavy clothing for the cold.

posted by Doug and Fellette @ 8:44 AM