Sun, Venus and the Moon's shadow at mid-eclipse (focal length 28 mm)
Click on the image for a shortcut to the eclipse story & pictures!
Go to March 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th (E day!), 10th, 11th, or 12th, 1997 - or just read on!
This is the last version, with all the pictures;
for the version with only the eclipse pictures click here,
and for the old text-only version click here!
You can also find out what SOHO saw around eclipse time, go onto a virtual tour of the sun, learn about the features visible around the eclipsed sun, or check reports on the previous eclipse in India from British observers, a Hawaiian photo specialist or myself.
This is the 5th day of our expedition in Siberia, on the quest to bag yet another total solar eclipse - and one that is widely regarded as a mission impossible. "This is a cold weather eclipse," the Eclipse Bulletin hat stated and conveyed a lot of dire warnings: "Electrical batteries retain only about 20% of their energy at -30 deg.C... Film will break as it winds forward" and so on. Only the conditions in Mongolia, where the path of the eclipse began, would be tolerable, the experts advised.
And yet here we were, three eclipse veterans from the North-Rhine Westfalia state in Western Germany, Bernd Brinkmann, Georg Dittié and myself, Daniel Fischer, already 7 and soon 8 time zones East of home - and with a trail of shattered preconceptions in our wake. Russia a 3rd world country on the brink of economical and social collapse? At least not where we had been so far: Apart from somewhat chaotic procedures at Sheremetyevo airport during an initial stop-over on the way from Frankfurt to Irkutsk the level of organization had approached Western standards.
The airplanes - run by the much-hailed new Russian carrier Transaero with Western comfort - had been quite on time, and our hosts had awaited us both in Irkutsk and later Ulan Ude (they had gotten their instructions from our German Siberia specialist via e-mail). A dense network of public transport (trams, trolley- and mini busses) surpassing that of many Western cities made getting around easy, and the supplies of food and everything else seemed plentiful. Getting hold of something to eat or drink in the middle of the night? No problem: Little kiosks are everywhere and never seem to close.
Siberian cities in winter a place of unbearable tristesse? To the contrary: Wooden architecture with delicately styled facades dominates cities and villages - and the buildings are painted in bright colors, while stony ones are generally well-maintained. And even unattractive housing areas from the Stalin and Chrushev eras change their face once you enter the living rooms - which we did all the time as we always chose homestays with Russian families over hotels. Even the smallest quarters are turned into comfortable islands, albeit often crowned by an amazing array of kitschy objects from various decades.
And finally: Siberia in winter and unbearably cold place, the best proxy to Antarctica? This idea, too, had to be qualified: True, in mid-winter temperatures drop to -40 degrees even in this Southern part of Siberia, but early March often yields a preview of spring, with daytime temperatures above freezing. And the air is dry, making cooler spells quite tolerable.
The large solar vacuum telescope, from the
outside and near the focal end
So now, after visiting
Irkutsk with its frozen Angara river, the breathtaking and also frozen
Lake Baikal
(with a big vacuum solar telescope on a nearby hill, unfortunately out
of commission), and the fascinating capital of the
Buryat Republic,
Ulan Ude (with an
excellent natural history museum, a large Buddhist temple nearby - and
the biggest Lenin head in the world), we were now on the
Trans-Siberian
Railroad again.
The first leg on this legendary line (which connects Moscow with Vladivostok and Beijing), from Irkutsk to Ulan Ude, had been uneventful (apart from the changing views of Lake Baikal and its surroundings) - but this time astronomy came over us with a bang. And before we arrived in Chita, the largest city in the zone of totality, we had won two new friends.
There was Dmitri, an educator from Moscow who had been on the train all the way from there and bringing sophisticated radiometric equipment to record a 'light curve' of the eclipse in the UV, visible light and IR. His childrens group was then supposed to analyze and publish the data. Dmitri was also an infinite source of information on how to travel to the extremely remote Tunguska impact site from 1908 - apparently there is an expedition from his organization to there every year.
Our other aquaintance on the train was Tolja, a young aspiring journalist from Chita who was returning to his hometown for the eclipse. When five astronomy enthusiasts meet in the middle of nowhere there is plenty to talk about, and so the 9 1/2 hrs in the Trans-Siberian sauna flew by. There was even a possibility to watch comet Hale-Bopp from the train, but only its dust tail made it through the dirty windows. Our new Russian friends were impressed (and struggled in vain to pronounce the comet's name American-style - there is no 'H' in Russian). When the train pulled into Chita we had exchanged lots of valuable information and, of course, our addresses: The axis Germany - Moscow - Chita will stay.
The Buddhist temple (Ivolginsk Datsan) and the frozen Selenga river
"E" - 2 days
In Chita. As before in Irkutsk and Ulan Ude we had
been met by local travel specialists or their relatives or friends -
everybody knows everyone else, it seemed, with the logistical center
being a small company in Irkutsk.
And as before we found a temporary home with private people - almost a
necessity in this town near the point where Russia, Mongolia and China
meet and where the few hotels are either way too expensive or occupied by
strange "business men" (or both - plus equipped with cockroaches falling
from the ceiling, as we were told).
Two days before the eclipse we had a number of "appointments". First, Tolja had arranged for us to give a little improvised talk about the event in German to students of the Foreign Language Academy of Chita University. Afterwards we distributed some primitive solar filters - nothing whatsoever had been prepared in this regard in Chita - and had to autograph various papers and photographs we happened to have with us. We also paid a visit to the head of the University's astronomy department and their "educational roof:" A number of clever geometrical constructions from bent metal rods had been placed here to explain celestial angles to the students. Several small telescopes were parked in the astronomer's office.
Since approaching Chita, the weather had turned perfectly clear (and finally "adaequately" cold for Siberia, with morning values around -25 degrees and noon values around -10). This gave us the first opportunity to show our hosts - and ourselves - Hale-Bopp in the evening sky: Despite the city lights the dust (but not the plasma) tail was very evident, and a 4-inch reflector easily revealed the famous dust shells in Hale-Bopp's inner coma.
"E" - 1 day
Today the sky is still cloud-free but not as transparent
as yesterday. It is a special day for Russians: March 8th, International
Womens' Day. And since it falls on a Saturday, the festivities are extended
into the following Monday as well, generating a 3-day holiday - with the
eclipse in the middle. March 8th is a family affair: The
streets of Chita were
pretty empty. In a restaurant we finally meet another foreigner, the
only other eclipse traveller we ever encountered during our stay in
Chita. Actually there should have been a few hundred, esp. Japanese, plus
a few dozen scientists, according to the local newspapers, but they must
have been hiding in their hotels or at dedicated observing sites
outside the city.
Our "find," though, has bad news: Clouds would be coming in tonight, and the prospects for eclipse day were unclear. Armed with this information one of our hosts goes to great lengths to call various offices in Chita and finally gets a rather detailled picture from the Weather Bureau: There is indeed a cyclonic system moving towards us from the West. Their advice: Go East... For the umpteenth time we change our travel plans at the last minute and decide to stay in Chita for tonight - in order to leave towards the East at 4 a.m. Ominous cirrus clouds can soon be spotted in the West.
Of little help for our planning is the Russian TV
which is dominated by March 8th stuff anyway. Only one news program
mentions tomorrow's eclipse and only in a humoristic context: If you live
in the West of Russia, hurry up and don't tell your wife. Weather satellite
images seem to be unknown to Russian TV, where the weather reports mainly
concentrate on temperatures.
Not that they were rude (they even organized chairs
for us) or obviously corrupt (they never even hinted at wanting to get
money) - but it was evident that they had not been instructed about
March 9th being an unusual day on which strangers might drive around in
the wee hours. The procedure took two hours and at times involved the
head of the Chita tourist bureau (on the phone) and a kind lady from
some visa dept. (in person). Lots of papers were filed and then we were
- verbally - "cleared" to move whereever we wanted.
No written document to that effect was handed to
us, however, but it wouldn't have had any use anyway: The "post" where we
had been intercepted hours earlier lay deserted when we passed there
again, and we never met any other GAI patrol on E day. This made this
episode - the only time during our whole journey that the old Soviet
Union raised its head again - all the more bizarre. Fortunately it was
over in time for us to resume our hunt for clear skies: While we had been
Sunrise was spectacular in that very cloud gap, and it
became clear that we were making progress towards it: The car actually
outran the clould front, at least for the time being. The
eclipse had long
started by then, and it was only 45 minutes til 2nd contact and beginning
of totality when we reached Urulga, a little village that our driver knew.
We took a little hill to the East of it, setting up our impromptu
observing site at about 1 100 m elevation. The air temperature was -20
degrees C, but who cared, with the sun shrinking almost visibly to a
smaller and smaller crescent.
Meanwhile the cloud front came nearer again and soon
a layer of broken thin clouds moved in front of the sun, which would be
18° above the horizon during totality. The view of the corona would
be somewhat compromized but little else - and then there was a phenomenon
which we had often read about but not actually planned for: The thin
clouds acted as a perfect screen onto which the shadow of the moon was
projected. Longer before 2nd contact than at totally clear eclipses it
could be seen approaching from the WSW, aided also by our high ground.
Amazingly also, all cameras - video and photographic - showed no signs
of malfunction due to the cold yet; the same could be said for the human
systems present.
Prints from the slides were scanned, slightly processed with Photoshop
on a Mac and converted to JPEG's with xv on an Ultrix system.
All photographs by Daniel Fischer. They may be reproduced if
credit is given and a link to this WWW page is made
or its URL mentioned!
2nd contact was breathtaking, with the dark wall of
the moon's shadow racing towards us and engulfing first a half,
then almost all of the sky.
And the colors! The dark zone surrounding the eclipsed sun does
not reach all the way to the Eastern horizon. Instead there is a bright an
colorful band where one looks out of the moon's umbra.
None of us had ever
observed an eclipse so low in the sky and from such a Northern location:
The all-sky view differed starkly from previous eclipses in the 1990's.
And also unique was the line-up of planets (notably Mercury and Venus close
to the Sun), almost parallel to the horizon: Usually we had travelled to
regions much closer to the equator where the ecliptic was always strongly
inclined.
As so often it was the highlight of the whole eclipse as
a long prominence near the North-Western limb of the sun was progressively
uncovered by the moon, easily visible to the naked eye. And when the moon
cleared the sun, the shadow racing away towards the North-East was once
more a stunning sight, visible for almost a minute. The expedition was
elated - despite the fact that the temperature had dropped another 5 to
10° during totality, our coats were covered with ice (from our
condensed breath) and the cameras were now so cold one couldn't touch
them anymore without gloves.
But all batteries and most mechanics had
taken the temperature drop without giving up: Arctic eclipses can
be done! And they can be done in the open, with a heated car as a warm
refuge, of course.
Nonetheless our enthusiasm for the now rapidly
growing photospheric crescent was somewhat stifled by the cold, and we
picked up and left ("normally" we wait another 70 minutes to celebrate
the 4th contact, too), once more traversing the stark beauty of wintery
East Siberia with its rolling hills, forests and frozen rovers. And then
the partying went ahead full swing: Our hosts in Chita - where the
eclipse had been well observed, too, through similar clouds as at our
site - took us out to a true Siberian winter picknick at the Molokowka
mineral water spring. One gathers around the hood of the car (at minus
temperatures and in snow flurries that had now set in) and drinks the
water (Russian: Voda) and a related beverage named Vodka... Still later on
E day we threw a party at a restaurant, and the celebrations continued at
home, til 4 a.m. This had been 24 hours none of us is likely to ever forget.
They not only spoke a remarkably accent-free English
and had a large vocabulary - they also fired question after question at us.
And one particularly clever 11-year old boy knew certainly more about
Western Europe's geography than anyone of us had ever known about
Transbaikalia, the region "beyond" Lake Baikal that Chita belongs to. Only one
major cultural gap surfaced during this fascinating 1 hr exchance, by the
way: The children couldn't understand why Germans aren't out in the woods
hunting all the time...
Later that afternoon the real celebration got
underway, a 6-hour (!) farewell party with all people who had made our stay
in Chita such a wonderful experience (and no, the GAI was not invited :-).
During the proceedings we also watched a 20-minutes special program on the
eclipse on local TV which documented the crowds watching on Lenin Square
and other places and also the professional eclipse camp outside the city
to which we had been invited two months ago. All had seemend set, but one
day (!) before leaving Germany we had learned by chance that the Moscow
astronomer responsible for the organization - who had declared everything
set and organized in faxes and e-mails - had in fact prepared nothing at all.
Only the amazing effectiveness of our German Siberia
specialist and his Irkutsk contact had saved the day on that Friday
afternoon. When said astronomer was featured prominently in the TV
program, our jeers for him were only half-hearted, of course. Hadn't he
bungled our trip to the remote observing site at the last minute, we would
never have spent four full days in Chita and gotten to know our
marvellous hosts (and their exciting lifestyle) so well!
A major Cherenkov detector for neutrinos with extreme
energies is being assembled here since 1993, hovering a few 100 meters
above the ground of the lake - which is 1366 meters below the water surface
here! The very clear water of the lake is the detector: Particles moving
We were picked up at the Irkutsk airport and were
rushed to the site with a minivan - driving first to the village of
Listvyanka and then for one hour straight over the ice! This is an
The
Baikal
observatory is unique in that no one has ever seen it as a
whole: it is assembled and disassembled (mainly for cleaning the photo
multiplier casings from sediments) in small pieces. Even a submarine that
recently studied the depths of Lake Baikal didn't dare to come close
because it could have become entangled in the cables. The amazing
Lake Baikal neutrino observatory and the pioneering astrophysics performed
here will be described in deserving detail elsewhere.
Lacking any comparision stars of similar magnitude
(-0.5, according to estimates posted from elsewhere) its brightness was
hard to guess, but it was still a bit weaker than the big red star on the
famous Kremlin clock tower as seen from Red Square. A fitting sight to end
a journey into a fascinating country, with people we have learned to know -
and value - better than on any other astronomical expedition. We'll stay
in touch, and who knows: More eclipses (such as
on Aug. 1st, 2008, in Western Siberia)
and the Tunguska site
beckon in the vastness beyond Moscow that is no longer the Wild East
to us...
Daniel Fischer,
Bonn/Koenigswinter, Germany, March 27 (updated April 21st), 1997
Eclipse Day!
At 4:30 a.m. it is clear again, and we head out of
the city, with a Japanese car, its driver and an interpreter. Hale-Bopp
is now a brilliant sight in the East, and once outside Chita the plasma
tail becomes visible again, at an angle with the much brighter dust tail.
Unfortunately our car has been sighted, too - by Russia's hated traffic
control militia GAI which guards a key road intersection. To this day we
are wondering what these people in their tiny jeep were up to, but all
arguing by our driver and interpreter didn't help: We were escorted back
to Chita and into the militia's HQ (at least they weren't impostors,
which we heard did exist).
in custody, Chita had clouded over. With the exception of a clear
patch close to the Eastern horizon, however, towards we now raced as fast
as the bumpy (but well-paved) road allowed us.
Second contact and chromosphere - the slight clouds are no problem
The innermost corona shortly after second contact, plus a few prominences
The inner solar system at one glance: the dark sun, Mercury & Venus!
Had one looked hard enough one could also have spotted
Hale-Bopp high above the dark sun, but probably without much of tail. Our
dash towards Urulga had given us 20 seconds of totality more than Chita had:
2 minutes and 35 seconds. This is already a very comfortable length for
an eclipse, giving you plenty of time to look at its beauty visually
(this year's
corona
resembled the minimum's form from
1994, as is also evident from images by the
LASCO coronagraph on the SOHO
satellite), try out several photographic techniques and prepare yourself
for the 3rd contact.
The chromosphere shortly before 3rd contact, with the long prominence to
the right...
... and the third contact with even a few Baily's Beads"E" + 1 day
Naturally the next day started a bit slow but allowed
us to reenact yesterday's eclipse on our host's TV set - totally rewiring
her system we even managed to make a copy for her. On the afternoon we had
our 2nd encounter with Chita's educational system when our host had
arranged a meeting with an English class of 5th graders. What a contrast
to the University setting three days earlier when the students had watched
our presentation in silence (apparently the traditional behaviour in the
presence of a teacher). But the 11- and 12-year olds were a different kind."E" + 2 days
Our departure from Chita was in style, too: by one
of the new "babyflot" descendants of the dissolved national Aeroflot state
airline. Til takeoff we weren't even sure two whom the Antonow 24B belonged,
because it was still painted in the old Aeroflot colors. The 2 hr flight
with the propeller plane (of ChitaAvia airlines) was very smooth, and the
airborne visions of frozen Lake Baikal before our arrival back in Irkutsk
were stunning. The ice on the lake was also the final astronomical target
of our Russian adventure because underneath it high-end astrophysical
research is taking place.
amazing way to travel (particularly when the van got stuck in the snow
on the ice), somewhere between driving on a salt lake and crossing
Antarctica. And then there was
the experiment, with
a computer and engineering center on the shore and the "ice camp" 3.6 km
away on the lake. Mid-March was a good time for a visit as the temperature
now allows for work in the open and the ice is still thick enough (about
40 cm) to carry the various winches which retrieve and lower the km-long
cables with the photo multipliers and other equipment."E" + 3 days
Finally there they were: Irkutsk airport has become
the focal point of eclipse travellers who had just returned from the Chita
area by train. They were all happy since all across the region the cloud
cover had been slight or even absent. And the story didn't end here. When
we visited the center of Moscow on our last afternoon in Russia, the skies
once again turned into a deep cloudfree blue. And then there was the comet
again, this time hovering over the walls and towers of the Kremlin and
plainly visible with the naked eye from the middle of the city.
Learn the Russian alphabet in a Moscow fast food restaurant...
... and the 3 days old moon next to the Kremlin clock tower.
