Annular Solar Eclipse Report - October 2024
Easter Island, Chile

Credit: Aditya Madhavan
Our thanks to Mike Frost​ for this report from Rapa Nui, Chile. Mike travels regularly with Astro Trails as one of our tour leaders and expert lecturers. He has recently been a contributer to the book Eclipse and Revelation (Total Solar Eclipses in Science, History, Literature, and the Arts) which can be purchased via this link
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I had the privilege of seeing the total solar eclipse of April 8th from Valley Mills, Texas, on an Astro-Trails tour; we watched totality through a gap in the clouds. I was expecting this to be the only eclipse that I saw in 2024, as none of the other non-total eclipses visible this year could be seen from anywhere near England. However, Astro-Trails had other ideas. Julie, who runs the company, asked if I’d like to be guest astronomer on their tour to Easter Island to see the annular eclipse of October 2nd. Easter Island!
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Annular eclipses are tricky to pitch to a non-astronomical audience – they are great fun to watch, but not as overwhelming as a total eclipse. I’m on record as saying that I’d usually travel to an annular if it was visible from the same continent as me, but no further. But … Easter Island! It’s one of those iconic locations that everyone knows from their school days, the location of Moai, the famous stone statues. So, of course I said yes.
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The eclipse began in the mid-Pacific, and Easter Island was the first land it crossed, though not on the centreline; the only other land touched by annularity was southern Patagonia in both Chile and Argentina. Weather prospects weren’t ideal for Easter Island, slightly better than Chilean Patagonia but worse than Argentina, plus there wasn’t much room to move once on the island.
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Our tour assembled in Santiago, the capital of Chile. I flew out the day before the tour started, to get over my jetlag and make sure I was ready to welcome everyone onto the tour. I took the chance to explore the neighbourhood, a bustling business and shopping district. The next day, Julie and I set up in the hotel lobby to meet and greet, and hand out the laminated cards which we used to scan passengers on and off buses.
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The next day (Saturday) there were a couple of optional tours. On my previous visit to Chile, after the solar eclipse of 2019, I enjoyed the all-day tour to the sea-side towns of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar, with a visit to a vineyard on the way back. But I had a pre-eclipse briefing to give in the evening, so instead I joined a city tour led by the inimitable Cecilia. She took us around the city centre, and eventually we fetched up at the presidential palace, to watch the changing of the guard. After the usual flurries of salutes and exchanging of standards, the military band prepared to strike up the national anthem. Except they played Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. That was a surprise!
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Of course, the presidential palace is a central location to recent Chilean politics. On September 11th 1973, Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, was deposed in a military coup and died in the palace in mysterious circumstances, being replaced by the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet. Chile returned to democracy in 1990, and a statue to Allende now stands in the corner of the square. Our tour was then (I think) disrupted by road closures. We ended up visiting Parque Bicentenario, not far from our hotel, and close to the European Southern Observatory’s Santiago HQ. The park was a pleasant place to wander round on a sunny morning, with views of the skyscrapers, South America’s tallest, in the business district.
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Sunday was the day we flew to Easter Island; so, of course, we had to get up early, for a 5:30 transfer to Santiago airport. Easter Island is administered by Chile, the nearest major country, although the native population considers itself Polynesian (though Thor Heyerdahl disagreed with this, and made his famous voyage on Kon Tiki to prove that the island could have been colonised from South America); previous administrators of the island include Britain. The island is known in Chile as Isla de Pascua, the Spanish translation of Easter Island, as the first European to see it was Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen on Easter Sunday 1772. The local name for the island is Rapa Nui.
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Rapa Nui is an island just under half the area of the Isle of Wight, in the south-eastern Pacific Ocean. It is seriously remote. The nearest inhabited land is Pitcairn, 1200 miles away, which has no airport; the nearest settlement of any size is on the Chilean coast, 2100 miles away. We think that Easter Island hosts the world’s most remote commercial airport. If a plane from Santiago can’t land at Easter Island, because of, say, high winds, it has to return to Santiago; there is nowhere nearby to divert to.
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So, we were a little nervous as our LATAM flight approached the island, after a five-hour flight. We flew south of the island, with a clear view of the Rano Kau volcanic crater, before turning round to approach the airstrip from the west; it was a clean landing, with no wind. Easter Island usually only gets three flights arriving each week, but because of eclipse interest extra flights were laid on, and we also saw a private jet. Nonetheless, we were the only arrival that afternoon.
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As soon as I had collected my bags, I left the terminal building, had a welcoming lei placed around my neck, and got everyone onto the correct buses to take them to their hotels. Astro-Trails had people in three hotels; amusingly, mine was right next to the airport, so that the drive round the car park was longer than the drive to the hotel.
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Everyone else started unpacking and trying out the hotel pools. Julie and I checked out our eclipse viewing sites. We were joined by Jamie Carter, a travel journalist who was embedded with us. We had two sites. Originally, we had hoped to observe the eclipse from the Orongo Stone Village, at the southern point of the island (from Rapa Nui, the Sun was due north during annularity). Unfortunately, the authorities on the island decided to close all the archaeological sites during the eclipse, as they were wary of astronomers trampling over sacred sites in pursuit of the perfect shot. So, instead, we decided to observe from the Rano Kau outlook point, on the northern side of the crater (Orongo is on the south side). The view over the Rano Kau crater is stunning, however there were no facilities there. So, we had selected an alternate viewing site at the Parcela Mahinatur farm. This was a more sheltered venue, without the spectacular views, but with a covered eating area. And a toilet block.
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I had two hotels to look after, so, after visiting the observation sites, I wandered over to my second hotel, the Iorana (this means “welcome” in Rapa Nui) and had a meal in the hotel restaurant. The Iorana is on the western coast and has wonderful views over the coastline – in fact, several residents opted to observe the eclipse from the hotel.
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For our first full day on the island, we embarked on a much-anticipated tour of Rapa Nui’s archaeological sites. Most of them are ruined, the results of a civil war on the island at the end of the Moai building phase. In the heyday, every village on the island had a platform, on which were erected statues, Moai, of illustrious ancestors, often with ceremonial red stone head-dresses on their heads. The villages were usually on the coast, and the platforms on the seaward side of the village, with the statues facing inland toward the village. The first stop on our tour was the ruined village of Akahanja. Here, the Moai have been toppled and their head-dresses lie on the ground.
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Our next stop was the extraordinary quarry of Rano Raraku, on the slopes of a central volcano. Here, Moai statues were quarried from the rock, and then distributed along avenues to villages around the island. Many statues broke en route, and you can see abandoned statues littered along the avenues. Many more statues remain, unfinished, on the quarry site; some are still partially in the rockface. Many of the famous Moai associated with Easter Island are located in the quarry.
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The other famous site associated with Rapa Nui is only a mile from the quarry. At Tongariki, fifteen Moai have been restored to their platform (and another solitary figure gazes balefully at them from the site entrance). We posed in front of them for a group photograph, photobombed by the fifteen statues, who resolutely refused to smile.
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After Tongariki, we drove back to Hanga Roa, the main settlement of the island, for a barbecue lunch, and then on to the northern coast of the island to see more sites. Pitokura is another ruined platform, but by the side is an unusual sight – a magnetic rock, brought, by legend, to the island by the original settlers. The rock was used for fertility ceremonies, but tourists are not allowed access, either to test the magnetic properties, or indeed carry out fertility rituals.
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Our final stop for the first day was another restored platform, Anakena, where five Moai, three with head-dresses, overlook a beautiful sandy bay. After taking pictures of the Moai, many of us ventured into the sea for a paddle.
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Day two on the island had another half-day tour. Ana Te Pahu is also a village with a ruined platform. But for this village, it’s the reason why the village is there which is of interest. The ruined village lies alongside a volcanic tunnel, once (a million years ago) the site of a stream of running lava, but now a tunnel with vents at intervals, where the ceiling has collapsed. The floor of the tunnel is cool and damp, and so the villagers planted banana trees, which grew up and out of the ceiling. It’s possible to climb down into the tunnel and walk through to the next vent.
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Next stop was another restored platform. Ahu Akivi is unusual, first because it’s inland, second because the Moai face out to sea, gazing nearly due west, aligned, apparently, with the setting point of the Sun at the equinoxes. Or are they gazing toward where the first settlers came from? Some people think that these statues commemorate the first settlers on the island (who arrived around a thousand years ago) gazing back towards Polynesia.
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The subsequent history of the island has not been peaceful. At the peak of Moai production, the population was around twenty thousand, twice what it is today. Then something happened; our guides called it a civil war, but others have suggested an ecological crash caused by deforestation. The population plummeted and the Moai building ceased. The population was further ravaged by Peruvian slavers and diseases such as TB and smallpox; by the nineteenth century, there were barely a hundred natives left, and the island was run as a sheep farm. Not until the 1960s, with the advent of tourism and the building of the runway, did some stability return to the island. There are now plans to return deforested species to the island and re-forest it.
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Our final stop on the second day tour was the Puna Vau quarry. This quarry, on the opposite side of the island to Rano Raraku, is where the red stone head-dresses were quarried. Again, there are abandoned head-dresses in situ, and you can see the slots which enabled them to be placed in the heads of the Moai. From the walls of the quarry, we could enjoy a view over Hanga Roa.
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There was one final treat for the second day, a stargazing evening in a dark sky site on the north of the island. The stargazing was run by a local company, and we were promised a tour of the southern skies, with an introduction to local names for the constellations. Unfortunately, the cultural part turned out to be rather minimal. Our hosts did have a couple of SeeStars, which they used to show sky sights to the assembled stargazers, but again this flagged rather quickly, as I’m not sure the locals knew their way around the sky too well. To try to give an alternative view, I teamed up with Aditya Madhavan, who had brought a Go-To scope, and we selected a variety of targets to show to a queue of observers. There was quite a lot of cloud in the sky, particularly, frustratingly, to the south, where we really wanted to look. Nonetheless, we were able to show people the globular cluster 47 Tucanae, the Lagoon nebula (M8), the ever-popular Saturn, the Wild Duck Cluster (M11), the Ring Nebula (M57) and the Omega Nebula (M17). When the skies did clear, we had a magnificent view of the Milky Way climbing into the sky, with the galactic centre in Sagittarius and the Scorpion plain to see.
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The next day was eclipse day. I got off to a good start, successfully spotting comet A3 Tsuchinshan-Atlas in the eastern sky just before dawn. The skies were mostly clear, although there were a number of scudding clouds crossing the sky at some speed. I made sure that everyone who wanted to got on a minibus to either the Rano Kau or Parcela Mahinatur site. Up on the volcano, the winds were far too high on the crater rim, so the group made the decision to drop down the slope 300m or so, to a more sheltered location, still with a view over Hanga Roa. Lunch arrived as we set up for the eclipse; first contact was 12:40, and annularity shortly after 2:00 PM (though the Sun was actually due north at this point, as Easter Island fiddles its time zones so that it is not disconnected from business on the Chilean mainland). We were joined by some more viewers unconnected to Astro-Trails, including a Chilean family and a German astronomer who had worked at the ESO in Chile. My trusty kitchen colander, used to project the eclipsed sun onto the red soil, was as always popular.
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Annularity was spectacular. There was a cloud in the way for the first forty-five seconds, but this meant that we could see the solar annulus with the naked eye (but no magnification!) filtered through the cloud. For the rest of annularity, there was no cloud, so our imagers had plenty of opportunity to take pictures. Of course we took pictures of the annular pinhole images! The group at our alternative viewing location, Parcela Mahinatur, had a cloudless view of annularity.
​That evening, I met up for a meal with fellow eclipse chasers Julie, Aditya, Andreas Möller, Jörg Schoppmeyer, Nicole Hollenbeck and Reni Tent. We toasted another successfully observed eclipse, from an extraordinary location on the other side of the world.
Jamie Carter also travelled with the group and wrote an account of the eclipse for space.com - https://www.space.com/annular-solar-eclipse-easter-island-first-hand-experience
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