For a few pictures from this trip, click here!
Picture this: The booking office of the railway station of Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan, afternoon of October 24, 1995. We were only looking for a refund (which we didn't get) and information (which was: Better take the bus). We, that is an everchanging group of avid eclipse chasers (and finders!) from Germany, somewhat organized by a core group from the Bonn area; sometimes we call ourselves the "Bonn Eclipse Task Force", adapted from some badges we had gotten in the Philippines... Suddenly one railway official had asked: Say, haven't you come from Neem ka Thana? Out of nowhere chairs appeared, we were served fresh tea, and the whole office crew gathered around us. Neem ka Thana: One week before this little city of some 40 000 in Northeastern Rajasthan had been unknown anywhere else in India, but since a few days it was mentioned in virtually every newscast and newspaper article which dealt with the total solar eclipse which had passed over this part of the world this morning. Now many Indians were wondering what had made their country - and especially this town - so important that people from all over the world had come flocking here. We explained to the railway people that it had been the extremely high probability for clear skies that had favored observations in Western India, despite a totality of less than one minute, and that we had indeed experienced the best eclipse skies in decades. Only Baja California Sur in Mexico, 1991, had been a match; the two Asian eclipses of the 1980's (Indonesia 1983 and Mindanao 1988) hadn't been nearly as clear, nor was Chile 1994 (and we won't speak of Finland 1990 here :-). More difficult was the next question: What were the benefits of the eclipse for the common man in India? We had heard that before and explained once more the intrinsic value of basic science - which, admittedly, was far from being number one of our reasons to travel from eclipse to eclipse. It was more the drive to improve our photo- and videographic techniques - and the sheer fun of experiencing the eclipse phenomenon with all its natural and social side effects - than actual science that motivated most of us (for me, e.g., it was total eclipse no. 6, for others no. 5, no. 3 and so on). Nonetheless sometimes valuable findings come out of the results, and image processing experiments of mine with the splendid maximum corona of 1991 caused interest at a solar eclipse conference in Bolivia in 1995 - the paper can be found in the Proceedings, published in the Revista de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Boliva, no. 69, 47-55 (1995). And we have found that eclipses get even more interesting when observed with solar professionals! There aren't many astronomers who still travel around the world to eclipses these days (working with spacecraft like SOHO that offer total eclipses of 2 y e a r s duration seems more attractive...), but those who do will hardly skip one event. Vojto Rusin from Slovakia, e.g., attended the eclipses in Chile, India and even the Bolivian conference in between. We met the same Japanese with their totally automated telescopes in both places. And it was actually at the Chilean eclipse camp where we had met the expedition from Jagdev Singh from the Indian Institute for Astrophysics in Bangalore who had invited us to their very own eclipse camp in Neem ka Thana. The Indian team had almost built a city within the city, a high-tech camp on a vast playing ground behind a school. Masons had built telescope mounts for the 200+ astronomers from several continents, another nearby school had been turned into a hotel and workshop, and the astrophysicists had even hired a number of the ubiquitous three-wheeled 'scooters' which visitors of the camp could use for free. Last but not least correspondents from various Indian news media had invaded Neem ka Thana, including about a dozen TV teams - this would be one site from which the eclipse would be broadcast live. This little town, well connected by train but barely reachable by road, had a charm of its own - you could only hate it or love it. This was pure Rajasthan: Hardly any paved roads, dirt everywhere, pigs enjoying the latter, holy cows and slow camel carts blocking the traffic and so on. But also more color than some videocameras could handle, shops offering almost anything, from Whiskey to English-language newspapers to the repair of flashlights, rich markets - and friendly and helpful people as far as the eye could see. This was a marked contrast to the India that most tourists learn to know and hate, especially those travelling in large buses to the spotlights of sightseeing - where you are overrun indeed by people who want to sell you something. But the other 99.9% of India are different and actually more fun to travel in than e.g. the equally impressive Thailand or Indonesia. This is because English is spoken widely, and if not, there's always someone around who can and will translate. For example, when we were 'forced' to give a little open-air lecture on how an eclipse works (not by the locals, mind you, but Western tourists who had come to Neem ka Thana for some obscure eclipse dance event), there was someone present who translated our show into Hindi. The 'live planetarium' (with a lemon representing the moon and an apple - with 'Neem ka Thana' on it - as the Earth) drew quite some crowd. A crowd of a different kind had greeted us when we visited the town a few days earlier, to leave some equipment behind. School was still on then, and when our car - an 'Ambassador', strongly resembling a London taxi but white - arrived, we were surrounded immediately by hundreds of students, cheering and asking for autograms. Another unexpected contact with the locals took place on the evening before the eclipse, when whole families appeared in our living quartes, to collect more signatures and, more importantly, to wish us "Happy Diwali!" This important holiday coincided with a total eclipse for the first time since 1762, a startling fact, according to Indian astrologers. By then it had become evident that the people of Neem ka Thana had gained quite some self-esteem from the continuous coverage in the media, and they met their foreign visitors as proud hosts. Unfortunately, little had been done to enrich t h e i r eclipse experience (a fact that some newspapers criticised sharply afterwards): In this rural place not one eclipse filter was for sale, and we had the impression that not much valuable information had been coming out of Indian TV. Once we saw, during the main evening news, an extremely grim announcer, apparently warning against a n y eclipse observations, on behalf of the government. But in contrast to similarly ill-advised advice in Indonesia or Mexico, this time there was opposition. Confronting their political leaders directly, many planetaria and popular science organizations took the education about the eclipse into their own hands. We learned about that only afterwards in Indian weeklies, though: Neem ka Thana (and even many large cities close to the zone of totality) had been left out. The week before we had arrived in India and ended up, like most first-timers, in an overprized hotel in a lousy part of New Delhi. After a short tour of the vast city and - too much - travel over horrible 'highways' (which no Western driver would survive long) and Rajasthan's rotten backroads we had been to the 'tiger' park of Sariska (judging from the number of deer around, the cats must have been on vacation), the little known town of Alwar with beautiful Moghul architecture but few tourists and to Jaipur. There our driver finally managed to drag us into a carpet store (we resisted the urge to buy anything) and a jewel shop, where we finally surrendered - well, they took credit cards, and the 'tutorial' on semiprecious stones by the boss himself was actually great fun. Then we had planned to return to Neem ka Thana for the real purpose of our trip - but the train before ours had derailed, and while watching the intriguing hydraulics that managed to put it back onto the tracks was interesting, our own train never came, nor did the authorities consider it a good idea to tell anyone about it. So - after taking illfated advise to head to another town in the middle of nowhere - we ended up once more in a car, but this one actually delivered us at the eclipse site, on the evening of October 22nd. Another member of our team had also just arrived, this one a particularly avid eclipsomaniac who never misses any event, be it total or annular or just a solar eclipse by Titan on Saturn (which to see he went to Australia twice in 1995). The final two members of our group arrived on the 23rd, and by then some doubts about the quality of the skies had come and gone again. This time statistics would prevail which forecast excellent viewing. And indeed: When the sun rose on the 24th, at 6:45 in the morning, even the typical dust of Rajasthan seemed to have gone. Somehow this eclipse camp was the most relaxed one I've ever experienced: No one even seemed to care for the precise times of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th contact. At least we had the accurate time, thanks to a gigantic GPS receiver some radio astronomers had brought: It was pretty close to 7:24:00 local time (that's 1:54 UT - note the weird half our difference!) when the moon first touched the almost spotless sun. We knew that its apparent diameter was only 1% larger than the sun's this time: This would give us less than one minute of totality but some consolation price, too. Normally (that's at the typical 2-3 minute eclipses) the moon covers the chromosphere and the prominences pretty quickly, and then it's corona only - which is what one is usually interested in anyway. This time, there would be more chromosphere and prominences, while the view of the corona would shrink to some 45 seconds. With the approach of the 2nd contact the sky turned into a deeper and deeper blue while the vanishing sunlight changed into a strange yellow that seems to be particular to eclipses (and could have something to do with color differences on the solar disk from center to limb). The solar 'crescent' causes shadows to become both sharper and asymmetric - only minutes to go. The tension was now growing sharply, both among the seasoned observers and the thousands of locals who had flocked to the perimeter of the camp; the roof of the school building was packed. The level of cheers was rising, and the first Diwali fireworks were going off, fortunately all behind us and in the distance. The final minutes before 2nd contact: The solar crescent gets thinner and thinner but not shorter at first; instead now and then mountains on the moon cut off pieces of it which remain as beads of light before vanishing. But that can't go on forever and finally the whole crescent shrinks into one point of light. By that instant the inner corona of the sun is already visible: Now we have the so-called diamond ring effect, quite shortlived now. Then the last light from the sun's photosphere is gone - but what's that? Instead of getting really dark like in 1994, the sky stays a pretty bright blue - just like in 1991 when the solar corona was very bright (the maximum was near). But now, it turns out, the 40 km umbra that the moon cast on India is just to small to cause a dark sky like in 1994 - and the outer solar corona (we are now close to the minimum) is much fainter than in 1991. So it gets kind of drowned in the blue (and perfectly clear) sky and remains visually less impressive than at any time in the last 12 years. But, as predicted, the 'consolation prize' is great: The bright red chromosphere does indeed glow for a longer time than usual, and there are some exciting prominences to be seen, at least through camera view finders. Thanks to the small moon, they can be seen all around the sun at the same time. And in a flash it's over! What feels like a few seconds of totality (and was 45 seconds in reality, as timing from videos will prove) ends in another diamond ring, this time a more pronounced one, due to a deep valley on the moon that experts had warned about: It stole more than 5 seconds of darkness. That was a unique experience which we have relived time and again thanks to our slides (which all came out great, despite the advanced panic mode they were taken in) and video recordings - which we would watch and show to others several times while the journey continued. They would even make headlines in one South Indian newspaper afetr being played to one of their reporters - now we had become the news event. To our surprise India uses exactly the same video system as Germany, and so it was possible to connect the camcorders with TV sets all over the country. One such place was a little garden restaurant in Bharatpur where we had descended on a small hotel, next to the entrance of the spectacular bird sanctuary. The owner of the place, it turned out, had recorded the eclipse from the TV live programme and proudly showed us the tape: While the shadow of the sun was sweeping from West to East over India with twice the speed of sound, Doordarshan One had cleverly switched from one of three sites (the first being Neem ka Thana, what else) to the next down the line. Only the third cameraman, by the way, was clever enough to remove the solar filter just b e f o r e 2nd contact, to get the full drama of the onset of totality. It was amazing how the producers tried to even sample some 'instant science' from the locations one and two only minutes after the 3rd contact at location 3 - and they actually got something, like quicklook CCD images and Fabry-Perot spectra from Neem ka Thana. But what I liked best about the Doordarshan One live coverage of the eclipse - which captured the event f a r better than German TV did during the Mexican one! - were the comments by the show's host after it was all over. The camera on location three, Diamond Harbor near Calcutta, was panning over the amazing crowd that had gathered there, and he hailed the sheer fact that somebody was out in the open at all as a major progress for India. In 1980, when India had seen its last total eclipse, the very same TV station had deliberately chosen this moment to air one of its most popular programs, in order to lure the people indoors. But now, the host celebrated, India had learned how to enjoy Nature's greatest spectacle and was moving from the Middle Ages into the future - and that just one month after the ridiculous 'milk miracles'. Later the Indian print media would vary greatly in their judgement of how the country's politicians, organizations and, of course, people had reacted to the eclipse: The reviews ranged from favorably to outright disastrous. Probably the truth was somewhere in between: Just like India as such is a country of vast contrasts, so had been the eclipse experience for the almost 1 billion Indians. Interestingly the preparedness to enjoy the eclipse did not necessarily correlate with the level of education: This we learned during our final week in India. After Bharatpur we had returned briefly to Delhi - this time experiencing pure horror on 'Indias most highway' from Agra to Delhi, with an unbelievable level of air pollution and traffic chaos, but also the helpfulness of Delhi's newspapermen who even on Saturday night were willing to provide me with copies I had missed. Then we flew to Kochi in the Southern state of Kerala, a place very different from the North, more developped - and much more literate! Illiteracy has almost been extinguished here, Keralites read almost as much as all the remainder of India combined (or so I learned from the 'Limca Book of Records'). And yet, here, where the eclipse had been only partial, people had stayed indoors and completely succumbed to the old fears. Sure, the same had happened elsewhere, too: In Delhi, the streets had been deserted at eclipse time, with 1% of the typical traffic, and weird rituals were reported from rural areas. But many reports agreed that especially the young had been eager to enjoy the eclipse (calling for a 'replay' after it was over so quickly) - once they had been educated about the event. It is a pity that the level of eclipse education available on a wide scale did not even approach what the energetic crew of the planetarium of La Paz had been able to organize in Bolivia - an even less developped place than India - only one year before. Some Indian articles even referred in detail to the Bolivian success... Back in Germany after three most fascinating weeks the fun wasn't over yet. First, it turned out that many in our group had, despite the short time, obtained their best eclipse images ever. I could hardly believe how many details in the chromosphere and prominences had been captured by my 10 cm f/10 Maksutov system, which had already performed marvellously at the annular and total eclipses of 1994 - and cost only about 100 pound sterling: It had come from Russia via Poland. This instrument (whose image definition and freedom of vignetting easily outperform a famous and almost 10 times as expensive American Maksutov telescope) has already become the 'standard' eclipse instrument for German amateurs, and the Indian experience has demonstrated that 100 ASA slide film does not sample its resolution fully - next time we'll probably try out 50 ASA. One surprising result, valid only under the special circumstances of a small-umbra minimum eclipse, was that the corona looked 'better' on the slides and especially on video than it had on the sky: The boost of contrast did it well. But the particularly vast brightness contrast between the inner and the outer corona also makes it harder than ever to combine different exposures or video frames into one big picture: This work has barely begun - lots to do for the sad eclipse-free year of 1996. Well, the next adventure will be Siberia 1997, and India actually has provided us with a fitting slogan already (to be found on a popular brand of beer): "Most thrilling chilled" ... Addendum: The Siberian expedition has now taken place and is documented here!Daniel Fischer, Im Kottsiefen 10, 53639 Koenigswinter, Germany Tel./Fax.: ++49-2244-870-966, E-Mail: [email protected]
This article is based in part on a report in German which I wrote in Kerala and on the flight back; it appeared a few days later in my weekly newsletter Skyweek, Vol. 11, No. 42-44/1995. Copies can be obtained from the author, provided one pound or DM 2.- are enclosed for postage fees.