Astro Trails Eclipse Articles

With a long duration eclipse in prospect and a choice of two attractive locations, what could possibly go wrong? This was our biggest project to date, with groups travelling to both places. The longest duration was over the Mexican resorts at Baja California, which was easy to fix except for a shortage of flight seats. A flight chartered from an airline in Mexico nearly brought the plan to a halt when they failed to get the paperwork sorted for the flight resulting in a lo

This was always going to be a weather dependent eclipse with rapidly changing sunny gaps in large cumulous clouds. We flew in on a chartered flight on the morning of the eclipse, with a good view of the prevailing weather. Coaches were lined up at the airport and reports of “sunny spells” were coordinated, so we set off for the most promising. As the eclipse progressed, the clouds merged into a uniform dawn grey with the sun remaining hidden. The planet Venus appeared, a br

There were several destination options for this eclipse and based on weather data we selected a site on Banka Island, off the Indonesian Island of Sumatra and Davao, in the southern part of the Philippines. Banka Island was an easy short flight from Jakarta and there was a good hotel on the island. The observation site was a short run from the hotel and the sky was clear for the eclipse. The longer eclipse duration and exotic attractions of this part of Asia made for a large

Anticipating the likely weather conditions was quite an artform in those days, long before any sort of satellite aid. I spent some time in the library of the UK Met Office looking at historic reports from ships which sailed in those waters and the best prospects looked like an area on the north coast of Java, near the town of Surabaya. This was the largest group we had ever arranged but with help from the new Apple desk-top computers the administration worked flawlessly and

Every eclipse has different logistic obstacles and the 1981 event had plenty. As the track ran through the Soviet Union even getting weather data was not simple (are you spies..?) and when it was clear the best place was going to be in a closed region in Kazakhstan, the negotiations had to kick in early. All travel had to be set up through Intourist, the only outfit allowed to bring in foreigners so there was a mountain of paperwork and weeks of delays waiting for permission

I had driven over the road from Mombasa to Malindi some twenty years earlier when Kenya was still a colony and the road had aged no better than the rest of the country’s infrastructure. The plan was to observe the eclipse from the coast near Kilifi so we made some rapid changes to departure times to allow for the unpredictable Malindi Ferry and elephant size potholes in the roads. Every detail was in place the night before the eclipse, but then our coach disappeared – it appe