24 April 2006

Turkey Day 11 - Blotting out the Sun

Mar. 29th, 2006 | 11:55 pm
mood: ecstatic music: Airport annoucements
We got up and finally had a hot shower! Small joys. Russell set off to see if he actually had a hotel reservation and to move his stuff over - we toddled off to breakfast. It was a wonderful sunny day, not a cloud in the sky. We enjoyed another beautiful, if rather bread centric breakfast overlooking the Mediterranean. The mountains across the Bay still had a brilliant coating of snow, which near as we could tell had fallen two days before when we were caught in the rain. Possibly it had been there before and we missed it on our first day, but we all think it fell whilst were were there.

We had scouted out a number of sights to watch the eclipse from, but the big square near the hostel seemed like the best deal, close by, several nearby alternatives if it got too busy, close by to cafés if we suddenly needed tea... Since the weather was perfect, there seemed no need to have emergency get away plans.

So we camped out on the retaining wall, and watched the people very slowly gather. It turned out that the website had neglected to adjust for Daylight savings time, so we were an hour early, but this gave us more time to watch the people.
Other early arrivals included a German family of four, a older English couple from Ipswitch (he had the film that let you see the sun in white, rather than the sort of tan that our shade 14 welding glass showed - as well as a 1000x lens).

We watched the boats come and go, somebody swimming off the rocks, the palm tree trimmers working on the street leading away from the ocean, the poor guys trying to sell Polaroids in one of the most densely camera populated places in the city. Tour groups came and went, but eventually people came and stayed, but it never got terribly crowded. A bunch of people set up telescopes off to one side, and there was a TV camera crew set up, as well as a bunch of people with tripods. (Note to self, bring tripod next time - even a small one).

At long last the moon arrived and the dog started eating the sun. The eclipse happened very slowly and we took plenty of pictures as the occlusion progressed. The sky remained clear, though slowly high thin clouds started to gather around the mountains, which made us glad that we did not leave the coast as many people seem to have done. It might have been possible to get another 11 seconds of totality, but that would have meant hiring a car and driving and general hassle.

Gradually it started getting dimmer out and at about 25% we started putting jackets on, and by 50% it was starting to get cold. There was building excitement as it was clearly getting darker out, and by 75% there was a buzz in the crowd, the street lights started coming on, and the birds started getting more excited than they had been.

It was also clear by this time that the sky was going to hold clear and the last wispy cloud moved out the the danger zone. Excitement was mounting. We found we could take hundreds of pictures of the sun and because most of the field was black, they compressed to nothing. then the Sun fairly rapidly was reduced to an ever decreasing sliver of light, and as the moon gained it got darker and darker into an eery grey twilight, with the rosy hues of sunset 360 degrees around the horizon, except for the far mountains which were dimmer, but not dim, the nearer mountains turned pink on their snow covered slopes.

Then, at last the cheer went up, the last bit of sun was blotted out - the corrona shown a glimmering white circle around a coal black round hole in the sky, Venus and some of the brighter stars were visible and you could see the Sun's outer atmosphere shimmering and moving around the blackness of the moon. We struggled to divide our attention between the spectacle over head an attempt to get a couple of pictures of it, to see the eery vision of a darkened landscape about us, the funky horizon of pink, and in the far mountains the shining glimmer of snow beyond the shadow.

We had hoped, from our vantage point overlooking the ocean, to seen the shadow rushing over us but it came gradually, though we thought we might have seen the shadow leave.

Our mission done, we went the the Antalya Museum in the afternoon - since it was the thing that we had not done yet. Most of the "good" stuff from the ruined cities (statues etc.) is in the museum. It was a pretty good museum, and happily everything was in Turkish and English again.

Afterwards we met up with Russell's advisior who was also in town for the eclipse and had dinner in the same place we had had dinner the other night becasue they were near our hotel, open, and had veggie food. Then it was off to the airport, and the flight to Instanbul. Not especially eventfull, they did load the plane from both ends.

In Istanbul we discovered that the hotel did not, as advertised, have a shuttle from the airport, so after dodging a really expensive way of getting to the hotel (which we knew was bogus from previous taxi rides) we took the taxi. The nice hotel we had for the last night turned out to be down the street from where we had originally stayed. I still had a bit of energy left - so I took a last walk to the Blue Mosque and St. Sophia, and had a last beer at the bar accross the street from our original hostel, and chatted with some american guys who were just starting their trip.

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