Eclipse

Despite the 4 o'clock wake-up, there was a buzz of anticipation on the bus as we headed out of town and into our first real dose of rural scenery. Within a couple of hours we were into the mountains and staggering views rose above us, and more engagingly plummeted away from us, as we snaked up the tightly winding road towards Purple Mountain.

I'd had no idea what to expect of our eclipse viewing site, but it was perfect - a mountaintop observatory. Places had been allocated around the edge of a small reservoir and the crowd was thinly spread. There were plenty of tour groups kitted out in their own team shirts featuring the eclipse they had yet to see, a boggling array of telescopes and long-lenses, geeks and eclipsoids of every nation. In addition to this there were some fenced-off areas housing visiting scientists who were camped out with telescopes the size of jet engines and other unidentifiable paraphernalia. The sky stayed determinedly cloudy.

Then, maybe ten minutes before first contact, the sun came out. A cheer went up and my goosepimples went down. Gursh had set up a simple but ingenious viewing device, projecting through a telephoto lens onto a piece of card and as the partial eclipse began, this drew quite a crowd.

Things happened slowly - as you'd expect from the longest total eclipse in a hundred years - but every moment was worth seeing. Thin cloud continued to wisp sporadically across the sun, but never for long. An hour later, a strange dusk began to fall, the colours around us saturated like just before a thunder storm. The sun became a slender crescent, then with a flash of its diamond ring, it had gone. I took off my glasses and saw the black sun. A halo of light glowed gently around it. I think I stopped breathing. Then I cried. Words cannot describe how it felt to see it. I was overwhelmed. Slowly I started to notice that night had fallen, that there were shades of sunset orange above the horizon, that there were stars to be seen. But my eyes were drawn back again and again to the sun, the black sun.

I joined the others and Gursh half-teased me for being overcome, but I think he was really quite pleased at my reaction - he's already an eclipse addict.I sat on the grass and gazed some more, then as the moon looked just ready to slip away, the halo of light a little wider at the top, Gursh passed me his lens to use as a telescope for a closer look. Within seconds of me sighting the sun, the moon moved that crucial fraction and the diamond ring appeared. I froze in a silent gasp. It was staggeringly beautiful. A voice in my head said 'photo' but I ignored it. I couldn't have torn myself away if I'd wanted to. It was over in seconds, but somehow time stood still. Luckily I did listen to the voice in my head telling me to stop looking through a powerful lens as the sun began to reappear and quickly switched it for my solar glasses.

The eighty or so minutes of partial eclipse that followed totality passed with us happily flitting between watching, chatting and comparing photos. Many groups packed up and started to leave, but we stayed to the end, marvelling at what we had seen and what we were still witnessing.

An hour later, the heavens opened. Rain fell, no, cascaded from the sky, all but
obliterating the view even a couple of meters from the bus windows. We had been lucky. Or should I say even luckier than we had known up on the top of Purple Mountain.