Weather and geography made it difficult to see the rare spectacle, but some intrepid people got an exciting view of the eclipse from unique vantage points.
Thursday morning a few lucky or intrepid humans scattered from Siberia to Northern Canada got the chance to see the old familiar sun mostly blotted out from the sky. The cosmos will do that for you from time to time as the ceaseless wanderings of our planet, the sun and moon bring them into line like billiard balls on a velvet space table.
The result this morning was an annular solar eclipse.
During such an eclipse, the black silhouette of the moon — too far from Earth to completely cover the sun — will be surrounded by a thin ring of our home star’s surface, or photosphere.
Astronomers call it a “ring of fire.”
This was an eclipse chaser’s eclipse, and not an easy one to casually see in its complete wonder. It started after sunrise north of Lake Superior and began crossing remote regions of Canada, on its way into Greenland and the Arctic Ocean before going over the North Pole. Its course then headed south before ending in parts of the Russian Far East. Outside of the path, some viewers experience a partial solar eclipse, like in metropolitan New York where the sun was about 73 percent obscured shortly after dawn.
In order to experience the terrible and beautiful effects of this moment of cosmic geometry, some astronomers were organized enough to book airplane flights into the zone of maximum darkness, or watch from sky-high perches in Midtown Manhattan. Others of us pried ourselves and our children out of bed before dawn, hoping against hope that dire weather forecasts were wrong and we would all experience a sense of cosmic citizenship.
— Dennis Overbye
Solar Eclipse - United Kingdom
The stunning sky spectacle will start shortly after 10am today, with stargazers across Britain expected to try and catch a glimpse. The annular eclipse will be seen in full as a 'ring of fire' by punters in some lucky countries in the far northern hemisphere, but in the UK, we will have to make do with a partial eclipse.
Shetland, the most northerly island group in Britain, is likely to have more than a third of the sun covered by the moon, with an expected 39 per cent obscuration.
Begging the clouds to part
Clouds hung on the horizon in Manhattan at sunrise, creating challenges for eclipse viewers at ground level. But the weather didn’t interfere with the enthusiasm of about 25 guests who had begun arriving at the Empire State Building at 4:30 a.m. on Thursday.
It was dark and windy as the visitors spread out across the 86th floor observation deck 1,050 feet above midtown, adjusting camera lenses and perfecting positions as they waited for the sun to appear.
Eclipse Air takes flight
Jay Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College, has chased eclipses all over the world and wasn’t planning to miss this one.
He, his wife, Naomi, and another 30 or so people boarded a three-hour Delta flight out of Minneapolis into the darkness and back. The trip was sponsored by Sky and Telescope magazine and led by Kelly Beatty, a senior editor of the magazine.
Seats on the plane went for up to $3,100 according to a price list.
The plane flew to 39,000 feet and was 5,000 feet above the clouds, giving the Pasachoffs and their fellow passengers a lengthy view of the eclipse.
“We were able to see the eclipsed sun for about a half-hour, with four and a half minutes in which we saw the bright ring around the black silhouette of the moon,” he wrote in an email.
He added that it was the 73rd solar eclipse and the 19th annular one he had seen.
— Dennis Overbye
‘Something we can share apart’ in Canada
Sudbury, a town in Ontario north of Lake Huron, was not in the path of annularity, and the sun there was about 85 percent obscured. But that didn’t make the experience any less special.
“It was a really good show. For sure,” said Colin Durocher, a member of the local chapter of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.
Getting to remote locations on the path of the full annular eclipse in Canada would have been challenging in normal times. Covid-19 restrictions made that even more difficult, and large groups were not advised to travel and gather in Ontario and Québec.
In North Bay, Ontario, east of Sudbury, the local astronomy club heeded the Covid restrictions and kept their gathering along Lake Bernard small. They were rewarded with perfect weather.
“We’re still kind of flying a little bit high,” said Bill Montague, the club’s president. “Once we knew it was finished, we all stood up and we’re just high-fiving each other. It was awesome. It was great.”
In Russia, the “ring of fire” interrupted the “white nights”
In Russia, the eclipse was visible in full only in Yakutia, a remote and sparsely populated region that is closer to Alaska than to Moscow and is known also as the Sakha Republic.
In Chokurdakh near the Arctic Ocean, Sakhayana Tomskaya and her family managed to enjoy the eclipse in its full glory.
“It’s white nights here in Chokurdakh, and we normally use two layers of curtains,” she said, referring to the time in June when the sun barely sets in areas at high latitudes. “But at the time of the full eclipse it got completely dark in the house.”
She woke her children, who are 4 and 10 and had already gone to bed, to see the “ring of fire,” and she and her husband took pictures. They all made wishes.
Further south in the small town of Zyryanka, along the Kolyma river, weather conditions were not on the stargazers’ side. Nina Ruchko, an attendant at a local dormitory, was looking forward to seeing the rare eclipse, but there was nothing but rain.
“It’s been pouring all day,” she said.
Rainy conditions also prevailed in Moscow, where the eclipse only covered about 15 percent of the sun and the city’s planetarium had organized a viewing.
— Alina Lobzina
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