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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (34991)	8/15/1999 5:40:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Hi Ish, Yes, I got to see a lot of the eclipse, but not all of it. We spent the night before in Halifax, and were thinking of watching it from the Citadel, an 18th century star fort on a hill overlooking the city, but one of the docents said it wasn't safe there at night, so he recommended the York Redoubt, another fortification down close to the Atlantic. But that didn't open until 9:00 am, so we continued down the road about a mile, and found an overlook on the Atlantic that faced east. The next morning we got there before sunrise, because the sun was eclipsed when it rose. There was already another couple there, also from Virginia!, a retired couple, the man is an amateur astronomer, he had a projection telescope and a telescope set up to look directly at the sun, which was nice because a few dozen people came there later, and none had protective eyewear. I had 6 number 14 glass eyepieces for welder's goggles, and we passed the extras around. When the sun rose it looked like a quarter moon, through the eyepieces, if you looked straight at it without protective eyewear you couldn't see the shape. It was about 85% eclipsed before it was too obscured by clouds to see. During the maximum eclipse we couldn't see it at all for the clouds, but it did get eerily cold and dark. Then it came out from behind the clouds for a while, and we watched it until the eclipse was gone. All in all it was maybe an hour. So we had quite a good view of it for much of the time. Definitely worth the trip. Later I read that some local astronomers had better luck in Cape Breton, I saw photos in the local paper that they had taken all through the elipse. One thing I found curious was all the people who came to see the eclipse without any eye protection whatever, and they didn't even use pinhole projection or anything. The kindly amateur astronomer let them look through the telescope, and the projection telescope image was really as good as anything else. Another thing that surprised me was how few of the locals were aware of the eclipse, a few had heard that you could see it in England, there were articles in the paper that some people in England were disappointed because they were hoping to make money off the tourists, and didn't, that was about all the local awareness, even among people who worked in museums.