Friday, April 08, 2005
Things in Front of the Sun
The central condition of eclipse meteorology is that the air starts to cool about halfway between first and second contact, and the weather suddenly starts behaving as if it's the late afternoon. So do the animals, but there aren't many animals we can look at near S 21° 19' W 123° 23' in the South Pacific ocean. I think somebody saw a tuna a couple of days ago.
This means that if the air is cloudy and wet, clouds start to form even more. So whatever kind of weather you had in the morning, and however much it started to dry out with the rising sun, it's going to get worse again.
And it did. Captain Gilles Bossard, together with his consulting astronomers and weather mavens on the ship and on the Internet, had gone due north from Pitcairn and then turned and set a heading directly back along the central line of totality. There were three minor weather systems surrounding this point at a distance; one didn't want to get north of the 21st parallel in order to stay in what passes for dry air down here. And in fact, the morning dawned like all the rest: puffy clouds at about 2500 meters and scattered stratocumulus at 5000. The navigator, Rodin Tomislav, told me early on that he estimated cloud cover at 35%. The wind seemed to be coming out of ENE about 20 knots while the Paul Gauguin was going SW at what seemed about 10 knots which gave the effect of the clouds following us and drifting overhead at an annoyingly slow rate. But all of this was hard to appreciate because the main effect in this weather in this part of the world is the formation and dissolution of the clouds — a whole section of sky would disappear behind a cloud in two or three minutes. And again, it could open up.
It seemed for much of the time, and I suppose this is subjective, that we were proceeding along the track directly under a stripe of clouds which had formed just about first contact (10:25 AM local time) as the ship was turning onto the eclipse track, and was getting worse and worse, while on the sides it seemed there was relatively clear weather.
Some time about 11:15 the weather seemed to stabilize a bit, and we had probably twenty minutes without any serious looming clouds. But about 15 minutes before totality, a mass of clouds caught up with us on the track and stayed there as the clock ticked down. Clouds had come and gone all morning, and it wasn't until the sky got very dark and persistently cold, that the sense descended over the 9th deck that this one might not go away.
But it did, finally, giving one last, brief cause for hope. It blew past about 11:53. This was about three minutes before second contact. Yet there wasn't any cheering, because even as we glimpsed the crescent (which was shrinking fast), we saw and felt also the darkening and the chilling as another, lower, cloud, moving faster than the first moved in and closed off the little patch of blue the way one might cut off a car on the Mass Pike. At that point it was unfortunately all over because there is no way that a cloud of that size was going to blow past in the next two minutes.
We heard later that the captain was on the deck outside the bridge — bet you didn't know that you can steer a modern ship with a remote, but that is exactly how it's done. Usually he does that when he's pulling up to a dock and just wants to see if he's parallel parking correctly. In this case he was looking at the sky and fiddling furiously with whatever he uses for a joystick.
We got a tour of the bridge yesterday. The navigator, being polite, said that he thought the engine control program was written by engineers who hadn't actually ever been on a ship, but at least it wasn't Windows. There aren't any mission critical tasks dependent on Windows; they have to be certified by too many agencies in Europe and America for that (even if they are of Wallis and Futuna or Bahamian registry).
There's also a stabilizer. Big water wings. We can hear them creaking at night. "If you were on a cargo ship, you'd be feeling this a lot more," he said of the seas which were recorded as "moderate" in his (paper and pencil) log book. And speaking of paper, did you know that he is expected still every night to measure the angle of a star using an actual sextant and not just jotting down what GPS says in their redundant non-Windows -based GPS navigation systems? What a mix of tradition the art of sailing is.
Anyway, there we were waiting for second contact and a giant cloud over the sun. I haven't been clouded out very often (the annular eclipse with Mark Lacas in Palos Verdes was the worst; if only McCovey had hit the ball two feet higher!) and since there was a lot of blue sky everywhere but where I was I figured I would check out the approaching shadow and the sunset colors (of which there weren't any, so short and annular-at-heart was this event) and other things which you often miss when you are so intoxicated on Corona. And moreover, the anthropology of depressed astronomers (well they shouldn't have tried to do the pendulum experiment on shipboard.)
The lower cloud, being lower, was fairly racing across the sky, on account of trigonometry. But nobody was hoping for anything.
The guy on the loudspeaker started to count down the seconds until second contact. His voice had been crackling and excited and nervous all morning; now he seemed on a sterile upbeat autopilot, like Thomas Ellison may have sounded on the eve of his execution in Mutiny on the Bounty.
At "10" the sun, what was left of it, was completely invisible behind a darkened cloud.
By "7" the cloud had completely cleared the sun, partly through motion and partly through dissolution, the wisps evaporating as the last tiny crescent dissolved and broke and there instantaneously was the brilliant corona and a couple of souvenir prominences and about four solar diameters to the east, Venus glinted a sterling outrigger to the diamond ring which appeared forthwith and it was over.
Later it rained. That made the astronomers feel less ungracious about packing up before it was officially over. The ship’s band played Doors covers under an awning. But not Cat Stevens. It wasn’t much of a rain anyway, the kind that always happens, as if to say, this is the South Pacific, it rains, why such a long face? But we were having lunch by then, and taking pictures of ourselves with strangers and crew (who have opined to each other in Tagalog that we look like certain named characters in Lord of the Rings, which cognates can't hide in their secret language which everyone in the world except native speakers of English has for private communication. Those of you who went to Cal Tech may be amused that 35 years later I am once again being fed by Filipinos.)
I decided, about fourth contact, that this eclipse looked like pictures of eclipses. Remember that the moon was exactly the size of the solar disk; off the coast of New Zealand and in Panama this event was annular. So, it was very bright. Just looking at it, I didn't see any of the long coronal streamers that so distinguish actual eclipses from the ones depicted on film.
I didn't notice any shadow bands but nobody was looking for anything; we were all in a state of shock at having seen it at all. We shall see what photos end up getting posted from the Paul Gauguin and the Discovery. It's all so very modern, the tourists asking each other how their pictures came out when the solar disk is still 70% obscured. And, I think this is the first eclipse I've been to that was so extensively photographed with cell phones. But not to worry, the geeks were on deck with their Celestrons and gyroscopes and size-is-everything lenses as well.
Lunch was a lot more relaxed than breakfast. The food on the Paul Gauguin isn't half bad, considering all of it has to be refrigerated for two weeks and Jesse Cool can't phone up the hippies in Santa Cruz for an afternoon delivery of mizuna. There won't be a Bounty themed meal. We're signed up to take a galley tour on Sunday at 4:30 PM. Meanwhile, we're on a course bound for Hiva Oa in the Marquesas and some more fabulous extemporaneity from the anthropologist Mark Eddowes (the other night he talked for two hours straight about what really happened on the Bounty). It was Mark's first eclipse. He was surrounded by the dancing girls, chatting away with them in Tahitian, and I think by his demeanor that he must have channeled four thousand years of of exquisitely delineated archaeoastronomy into one ecstatic and singular moment.
This means that if the air is cloudy and wet, clouds start to form even more. So whatever kind of weather you had in the morning, and however much it started to dry out with the rising sun, it's going to get worse again.
And it did. Captain Gilles Bossard, together with his consulting astronomers and weather mavens on the ship and on the Internet, had gone due north from Pitcairn and then turned and set a heading directly back along the central line of totality. There were three minor weather systems surrounding this point at a distance; one didn't want to get north of the 21st parallel in order to stay in what passes for dry air down here. And in fact, the morning dawned like all the rest: puffy clouds at about 2500 meters and scattered stratocumulus at 5000. The navigator, Rodin Tomislav, told me early on that he estimated cloud cover at 35%. The wind seemed to be coming out of ENE about 20 knots while the Paul Gauguin was going SW at what seemed about 10 knots which gave the effect of the clouds following us and drifting overhead at an annoyingly slow rate. But all of this was hard to appreciate because the main effect in this weather in this part of the world is the formation and dissolution of the clouds — a whole section of sky would disappear behind a cloud in two or three minutes. And again, it could open up.
It seemed for much of the time, and I suppose this is subjective, that we were proceeding along the track directly under a stripe of clouds which had formed just about first contact (10:25 AM local time) as the ship was turning onto the eclipse track, and was getting worse and worse, while on the sides it seemed there was relatively clear weather.
Some time about 11:15 the weather seemed to stabilize a bit, and we had probably twenty minutes without any serious looming clouds. But about 15 minutes before totality, a mass of clouds caught up with us on the track and stayed there as the clock ticked down. Clouds had come and gone all morning, and it wasn't until the sky got very dark and persistently cold, that the sense descended over the 9th deck that this one might not go away.
But it did, finally, giving one last, brief cause for hope. It blew past about 11:53. This was about three minutes before second contact. Yet there wasn't any cheering, because even as we glimpsed the crescent (which was shrinking fast), we saw and felt also the darkening and the chilling as another, lower, cloud, moving faster than the first moved in and closed off the little patch of blue the way one might cut off a car on the Mass Pike. At that point it was unfortunately all over because there is no way that a cloud of that size was going to blow past in the next two minutes.
We heard later that the captain was on the deck outside the bridge — bet you didn't know that you can steer a modern ship with a remote, but that is exactly how it's done. Usually he does that when he's pulling up to a dock and just wants to see if he's parallel parking correctly. In this case he was looking at the sky and fiddling furiously with whatever he uses for a joystick.
We got a tour of the bridge yesterday. The navigator, being polite, said that he thought the engine control program was written by engineers who hadn't actually ever been on a ship, but at least it wasn't Windows. There aren't any mission critical tasks dependent on Windows; they have to be certified by too many agencies in Europe and America for that (even if they are of Wallis and Futuna or Bahamian registry).
There's also a stabilizer. Big water wings. We can hear them creaking at night. "If you were on a cargo ship, you'd be feeling this a lot more," he said of the seas which were recorded as "moderate" in his (paper and pencil) log book. And speaking of paper, did you know that he is expected still every night to measure the angle of a star using an actual sextant and not just jotting down what GPS says in their redundant non-Windows -based GPS navigation systems? What a mix of tradition the art of sailing is.
Anyway, there we were waiting for second contact and a giant cloud over the sun. I haven't been clouded out very often (the annular eclipse with Mark Lacas in Palos Verdes was the worst; if only McCovey had hit the ball two feet higher!) and since there was a lot of blue sky everywhere but where I was I figured I would check out the approaching shadow and the sunset colors (of which there weren't any, so short and annular-at-heart was this event) and other things which you often miss when you are so intoxicated on Corona. And moreover, the anthropology of depressed astronomers (well they shouldn't have tried to do the pendulum experiment on shipboard.)
The lower cloud, being lower, was fairly racing across the sky, on account of trigonometry. But nobody was hoping for anything.
The guy on the loudspeaker started to count down the seconds until second contact. His voice had been crackling and excited and nervous all morning; now he seemed on a sterile upbeat autopilot, like Thomas Ellison may have sounded on the eve of his execution in Mutiny on the Bounty.
At "10" the sun, what was left of it, was completely invisible behind a darkened cloud.
By "7" the cloud had completely cleared the sun, partly through motion and partly through dissolution, the wisps evaporating as the last tiny crescent dissolved and broke and there instantaneously was the brilliant corona and a couple of souvenir prominences and about four solar diameters to the east, Venus glinted a sterling outrigger to the diamond ring which appeared forthwith and it was over.
Later it rained. That made the astronomers feel less ungracious about packing up before it was officially over. The ship’s band played Doors covers under an awning. But not Cat Stevens. It wasn’t much of a rain anyway, the kind that always happens, as if to say, this is the South Pacific, it rains, why such a long face? But we were having lunch by then, and taking pictures of ourselves with strangers and crew (who have opined to each other in Tagalog that we look like certain named characters in Lord of the Rings, which cognates can't hide in their secret language which everyone in the world except native speakers of English has for private communication. Those of you who went to Cal Tech may be amused that 35 years later I am once again being fed by Filipinos.)
I decided, about fourth contact, that this eclipse looked like pictures of eclipses. Remember that the moon was exactly the size of the solar disk; off the coast of New Zealand and in Panama this event was annular. So, it was very bright. Just looking at it, I didn't see any of the long coronal streamers that so distinguish actual eclipses from the ones depicted on film.
I didn't notice any shadow bands but nobody was looking for anything; we were all in a state of shock at having seen it at all. We shall see what photos end up getting posted from the Paul Gauguin and the Discovery. It's all so very modern, the tourists asking each other how their pictures came out when the solar disk is still 70% obscured. And, I think this is the first eclipse I've been to that was so extensively photographed with cell phones. But not to worry, the geeks were on deck with their Celestrons and gyroscopes and size-is-everything lenses as well.
Lunch was a lot more relaxed than breakfast. The food on the Paul Gauguin isn't half bad, considering all of it has to be refrigerated for two weeks and Jesse Cool can't phone up the hippies in Santa Cruz for an afternoon delivery of mizuna. There won't be a Bounty themed meal. We're signed up to take a galley tour on Sunday at 4:30 PM. Meanwhile, we're on a course bound for Hiva Oa in the Marquesas and some more fabulous extemporaneity from the anthropologist Mark Eddowes (the other night he talked for two hours straight about what really happened on the Bounty). It was Mark's first eclipse. He was surrounded by the dancing girls, chatting away with them in Tahitian, and I think by his demeanor that he must have channeled four thousand years of of exquisitely delineated archaeoastronomy into one ecstatic and singular moment.
