The following was my description of the event -
“This morning we woke up to some clouds in the sky. We watched nervously as clumps of cloud gathered above us, but with the expert manoeuvring by the ship’s captain, we managed to dodge most of them. At the precise moment an hour and a half before totality, someone yelled out “First contact!” Sure enough, through a variety of filters we saw that a small part of the sun (I carefully chose the word “part” after Arthur Tan’s objection to my usage in my description of last year’s eclipse) had been blocked. The blocked part gradually increased and the intensity of the mid morning sun dropped away. Soon planets appeared; I saw Jupiter, which was otherwise not visible at this time, and others observed Mercury, which I regrettably missed. There were other stars, and some people even ventured but in vain to look for a faint comet near the sun.
We held our breath but watched on as on as a few wisps of cloud wandered past but the crescent sun reappeared. It gradually disappeared into a pointed light source in a darkened sky. With the moon’s faint outline, the juxtaposition for a moment resembled a diamond ring, with a sparkle brighter than any I had ever seen. A cheer of excitement rang out among the watchers and then the diamond ring was gone; at the precise moment, the sun suddenly became a dark disk in the sky but its corona brightly visible that we could safely watch with our naked eyes. The corona that stretched out several diameters of the dark disc was sufficient to throw faint light into the sky leaving the surrounding a beautiful deep blue,
We marvelled at the dark totality for a full 4 minutes before once again the sun reappeared to display another momentary diamond ring. We returned to our filtered viewing of the sun’s reappearance, but the show was largely over.”
More photos at http://picasaweb.google.com.au/kinmun.kan/EclipseDay#
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