Tag Archives: eclipse

Travel

Under a Black Sun

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(Featured photo courtesy of the Doctor and his photography skills.)

Normally I do these posts in proper order, following my travels as they happen. However, this one time I think it’s worth breaking that habit. For one thing, the first week of this trip has been unusually hectic, with next to no downtime in which to write, so I’m already behind. For a second, the event that this entire trip was centered around has already happened, and to waste any more time in committing my thoughts on it to words risks losing some of the detail.

In 2018, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), a collection of observatories in Chile’s Atacama desert, decided to celebrate an upcoming total solar eclipse by selling tickets to an unusually perfect viewing point: their mountaintop site at La Silla. I grabbed three tickets, roping in a couple of friends who were as keen as me to make the most of this opportunity. One had to drop out, but another replaced her, and so the three of us made our way to La Silla for July 2, 2019. The broader story of that trip will be told in the next post, but what follows below is my notes made directly after the event itself.

Well, that was special. It took the Lawyer and the Doctor a little over an hour to return (from their tour of the La Silla site), and when I went to follow in their footsteps, the New Technology Telescope (NTT) tour was closed due to VIP activity. So I returned and we hung out at the viewing spot we’d claimed for an hour or two, until the Lawyer and I went to queue for a tour of the massive reflector that sits on La Silla’s highest peak. Despite the presence of the Chilean President and two kids doing their best to start an avalanche, we made it up to the top of the mountain and spent a few awed moments roaming the interior of the telescope dome and marveling at the massive, if somewhat aged, technology within.

By the time we returned, having also spotted more than a few condors* circling the peak, it was about 1500. The Lawyer went to relieve the Doctor, while I took the opportunity of no queue at the now reopened NTT to tour that as well. After a quick run around the internal workings of the telescope, with its double sensors, cooling technology, and adaptive optics, I returned to our viewing spot. At that stage, there were only a few minutes until first contact at 1523. From that moment on, the crowd’s attention was ever more tightly focused on the sun, staring at it through the provided safety lenses and watching as the moon crawled across the face of the solar disc, dimming it more every minute.

As we approached totality, a chill fell over the land, and the contours of the valleys below La Silla were lost in shadow. Our own shadows were twisted by the crescent sun as strange, untimely colours stained the horizon.

Not the best of photos, but better than the one I took during totality.
Moments before totality, captured with my struggling phone camera. The sky colours are pretty visible though.

How to describe how things changed at totality? Up until the last few seconds, even the smallest fragment of the sun was too bright to look at. In an instant though, the sun gave way to a disc of complete darkness, wreathed in a halo of white flame. Colours danced along the horizon, the world utterly changed.

For just under two minutes, the hundreds of viewers gathered on the mountaintop experienced a very different universe to the one we know day-to-day.

As totality had been, the return of the sun’s light was greeted by cheers. An initial speck of light on the edge of the black disc was joined by another, bisected by lunar peaks. Moments later, the sun returned to us the world that had been. Once again there was light, and warmth too slowly returned.

It was as if we all released a breath we had been holding. Awed exclamations gave way to cheerful conversations and mutual congratulations. Slowly we turned to checking the records of the moments that we’d made, as if to distract from the ferment in our brains. Only by routine could we reacclimatise to the everyday world.

Slowly, reluctantly, people began to move. Some began to head for the buses and the long trip back to their lodgings. Others, like the three of us, were hanging around until sunset and later, so we retreated to the warmth of the vistors’ tent. That’s where the Lawyer and I are now, still coming down from our high, while the Doctor remains outside to catch some final shots of the occluded sun.

I’ve never experienced anything like that before. Not even close. And the best thing? We still have the stars to come.

We did hang around for a few more hours, as the sun set and the stars came out, brighter and more numerous than any of us had ever seen them before. Using my binoculars and the Doctor’s camera, we made the most of being in that place at that time, and even after the ESO staff shooed us off the mountain so that the observatory could get back to doing actual work, we did some more star-spotting on the plains below. As for getting back to our own lodgings, that turned out to be an adventure in itself, but one for another post. For now, and for then, the eclipse is enough.

* Possibly turkey vultures rather than condors. My birdwatching skills are not the best.

Travel

Black Sun Odyssey

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It’s that time of year again. (It’s not—that time of year would be September, if I hadn’t skipped it last year, for reasons.) The travel itch has overtaken me. (The travel itch never really goes away—what does overtake me is available money and time.) I’m about to go somewhere I’ve never been, see something I’ve never seen, and tell the story of it all here. (Those bits are true enough at least.) So sit back and let me explain what’s going to be.

A bit more than a year ago, one of the podcasts I follow, the ESOcast, flagged up something interesting. A total solar eclipse was due to pass over Chile in 2019, more specifically directly over one of ESO’s mountaintop observatories in the Atacama Desert. More relevantly, they were going to sell tickets to this event. My travel plans for 2018 having fallen through, the combination of viewing an eclipse, venturing into the southern hemisphere for the first time, and getting to visit and perhaps cross South America was too tempting to resist.

From darkness into light. A tale of two mountains.
A map of my own folly.

This time though, I did something unusual for me when travel planning. I reached out to a couple of friends who I knew to be astronomy buffs and suggested a joint trip. When I got positive responses, I booked three tickets. A year ahead of time, I was locked into a big trip. It was the longest lead time I’d ever had for a trip like this. The only question is what shape the entire trip would take. The result is the shape on the map above.

Santiago in Chile is the starting point, where myself, the Doctor and the Lawyer will congregate. Chile’s an awkwardly shaped country, thin as a ribbon and stretching across a good portion of the world’s latitude, north to south. The eclipse event is due to happen at a mountaintop site called La Silla, at the southern end of the Atacama Desert, so we’ll be driving (or to be more precise I will) five hours north, first to La Serena on the Pacific coast and then a further two hours north on the day itself to La Silla. As the Atacama is one of the driest spots on earth, this is as close as possible to a sure thing as regards eclipse watching, but either way it’ll be a unique experience.

After this, things don’t get any less interesting on the trip. Another night on the Pacific coast and a few more in Santiago, and then the Doctor and the Lawyer depart for European shores, whereas I go on my merry way. Once again, road and rail are my carriers, but South America’s rail system being as disconnected as it is, there’s only one rail section of this trip, from Cordoba to Buenos Aires in Argentina. To get there, I’ll be hopping two buses, crossing the Andes to the wine district of Mendoza before reaching Cordoba itself.

Buenos Aires comes highly recommended, so it should be a highlight on the trip, and I’ve set aside several days to explore it. Plus, it’s only a ferry trip away from another goal on this journey—the less-visited country of Uruguay and its capital of Montevideo. Like Moldova and Mongolia on earlier trips, Montevideo is an inexplicably personal requirement for a place to visit. Maybe I have a thing for locations starting with “Mo”?

Anyway, if things were otherwise, the trip might end there. I’ll have crossed another continent to add to Europe, Asia, and North America (and I have plans for two of the remaining three), and Pacific to Atlantic would be enough for me. Except that when I was booking flights, departures from Montevideo or even Buenos Aires were prohibitively expensive. So I made a somewhat rash decision that gave birth to the ludicrous-looking line on the map that runs north from Montevideo to the metropolis of São Paulo.

It’ll be the middle of winter when I hit Brazil, but a 29-hour bus trip will drop me into heat matching anything that an Irish summer can muster. For this last part of my trip, I don’t know how much time I’ll spend in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro (from whence my relatively cheap flight departs), but for my mum’s sake I’ll at least try to climb the hill overlooking the city to visit the Christ the Redeemer statue.

So that’s the plan. Another continent-spanning, mostly land-based odyssey, with a lot of freedom to improvise around some pre-booked fixed points. It’s been too long since I’ve been on one of these trips, and it’s going to be a novelty to be kicking it off in company for a change. My Spanish being as limited as it is, and the prevalence of English speakers being probably less than you’d find in Europe, I’m expecting to face a few more challenges than I have before, but challenging myself is part of the reason why I like to travel solo. You don’t learn anything new by doing the same old thing, again and again.

As always, I’ll fire up travel highlights here as often as I can, and more detailed travel journals will follow in their own good time. There’ll be photos and maybe even some videos, especially of the eclipse. I hope you enjoy it all. I know I will.