Eclipse 2009 Aboard the M/S Paul Gauguin

Richard Tresch Fienberg

Editor Emeritus, Sky & Telescope

For the 500 passengers and crew members of Regent Seven Seas Cruises’ Paul Gauguin, the total solar eclipse of July 21, 2009, was a nail-biter. Yes, we experienced totality in all its glory, but whether we’d succeed remained in doubt until the last minute. If not for the ship’s mobility and our captain’s relentless pursuit of a hole in the clouds, we’d have been skunked.

Eclipse Day came midway through a two-week South Pacific cruise jointly chartered by TravelQuest International (Prescott, AZ) and Wilderness Travel (Berkeley, CA). Sunrise brought calm seas and spectacularly clear skies. At lunchtime we reached our intended viewing spot near the end of the eclipse central line, where the Sun would hang only 8 degrees above the horizon during totality and then set beyond the sea while still partially eclipsed. We picked this spot because we could get there from Papeete, Tahiti (the Gauguin’s home port), and because it offered the best weather prospects along the entire path of totality — though still only a 50/50 chance of clear skies.

But as passengers assembled on the upper decks to set up tripods and cameras, clouds assembled over our heads in wisps and patches. Eventually white puffs were scattered all across the sky. The ones around the horizon were especially worrisome, because even patchy clouds appear solid when stacked one behind the other low in the sky.

First contact — the Moon’s first bite out of the Sun — nevertheless occurred in plain sight, sending up a chorus of cheers. Almost at once, though, thick clouds closed around the Sun. From then on, we got only occasional glimpses of the deepening partial eclipse, often without needing to use our solar filters. Meanwhile, Harvard University astronomer-historian Owen Gingerich, narrating the eclipse from the bridge, helped Captain Rajko Zupan determine where to move the ship to maximize our chances of putting the Sun in a clear spot by the time the Moon’s umbral shadow arrived.

Everyone had set up to watch the eclipse off the starboard side, but the ship had to turn around to get into the clear, so in the minutes leading up to second contact, there was pandemonium as people hurriedly moved their gear to the port side. At 6:15:05 p.m. local time, a spectacular “diamond ring” heralded the onset of totality as the last bit of the Sun’s brilliant photosphere was swallowed up and the luminescent corona emerged into view beyond the Moon’s black silhouette. Shouts of “Diamond ring!” and “Corona!” erupted from bow to stern. The tension of the run-up to totality quickly bled away, and everyone gaped at the awesome sight of the eclipsed Sun hovering low over the ocean, framed by clouds. Our position, from a quick GPS reading, was latitude 9 degrees 54 minutes south, longitude 164 degrees 44 minutes west.

Nobody recalls seeing Baily’s Beads at second contact, but Owen had the presence of mind to steal a glance at the dwindling solar crescent in a diffraction grating. He was rewarded with a splendid view of the flash spectrum, in which the continuous “rainbow” of the Sun’s photospheric light is replaced by discrete arcs of intensely pure colors from hot gas in the overlying chromosphere — but only for a moment before the Moon covers that solar layer as well. I had intended to look for the flash spectrum too, but in the excitement of the moment, I forgot to get out my diffraction grating.

At the beginning of totality, our attention was drawn not only to the pearly white corona but also to a brilliant electric-pink prominence at the 2 o’clock position on the eclipsed Sun’s limb. Photos later revealed a smaller prominence at 10 o’clock, but nobody recalls seeing it visually, their gaze fixed, no doubt, on the bigger, brighter one. Mercury popped into view about one fist-width (seen at arm’s length) above and slightly right of the eclipsed Sun, but some people missed it, because the planet appeared fainter than expected — probably due to the combination of low altitude and thin clouds or haze.

Strangely, the most disappointing aspect of this eclipse was the corona. Sure, it was pretty — even on this, my eighth total solar eclipse, I was transfixed by the sight of it — but its ghostly light didn’t extend very far (perhaps two to three solar radii), and there were no dramatic streamers. There were some nice polar brushes and a few knots and kinks in the inner corona, but not much else. No doubt the imperfect sky impaired our view, but reports from other locations where conditions were better suggest that the Sun really was especially quiet during this eclipse. The total lack of sunspots noted during the partial phases is another indicator. The current solar-activity minimum is very deep.

There’s a saying among eclipse chasers that no matter how long totality lasts, it always seems to last only 8 seconds. Many aboard the Gauguin, myself included, felt that this one lasted longer. I had plenty of time to view totality with my unaided eyes and through image-stabilized binoculars, to shoot dozens of photos with my handheld DSLR, and to make sure my video camera (which was on a tripod) remained aimed at the Sun throughout the eclipse. On one video clip, you can hear someone exclaim, “It’s lasting forever!” Maybe it was just knowing that this was the longest solar eclipse of the 21st century, though not at our location (you had to be further up the track, south of Japan, to enjoy the maximum 6 minutes 39 seconds of totality). Or maybe it was the lack of interesting detail to admire in the corona. In any case, it was nice not to feel rushed.

Our view of totality was enhanced by the “full Moon effect.” With the eclipsed Sun so low above the horizon, it looked bigger in angular size than usual. Many observers commented that the presence of clouds so close to the Sun amplified the effect further. Whatever the reason, the sight was mesmerizing. It didn’t hurt that the bright inner corona cast a long glitter path on the ocean below.

While the sky was much darker directly above the eclipsed Sun than it was off to the left or right, twilight colors along the horizon were muted because of the cloud cover. We simply couldn’t see out past the umbral shadow to where the partially eclipsed Sun was still shining on the distant ocean.

Two people had an especially dramatic experience of how dark the sky became during this eclipse. Staff captain Nenad Mogic and ship’s photographer Ryan Aguas sped off in a tiny zodiac so that Ryan could shoot the eclipse with the Gauguin in the foreground. Once back on the ship, Nenad commented that in the middle of totality the ship actually disappeared. He had to radio his colleagues on the bridge and ask them to turn on some lights so that the ship would show up in Ryan’s photos!

After 3 minutes 24 seconds of totality, at 6:18:29 p.m., deep valleys along the Moon’s trailing limb began to uncover the Sun’s chromosphere and then photosphere. Many people noted a stunning arc of hot pink along the bottom limb, immediately followed by two tiny Baily’s Beads flanking a brilliant jewel as another “diamond ring” announced the end of totality. Shouts of “shadow bands” erupted on the top deck as some observers noticed very faint, undulating ripples of dark and light moving across the ship’s superstructure. These hard-to-see features result from atmospheric “twinkling” of the thin solar crescent just before second contact and/or just after third contact (as in this case).

Once again, photos show several prominences along the Sun’s limb, but nobody remembers seeing them. The reason is clear: At third contact, the flash of brilliant sunlight lit up the clouds and ocean with a burst of color. This scene was the most spectacular of the entire event and triggered an outpouring of exclamations and applause.

We had hoped to watch the still-eclipsed Sun set into the Pacific, but within minutes of the end of totality, clouds again intervened. We caught a few glimpses of the growing crescent, but the Sun was completely obscured by the time it set. This was only a minor disappointment considering the spectacular event we’d just enjoyed in such dramatic fashion — and the champagne that flowed abundantly afterward.

Unusual things often happen during solar eclipses, and this one was no exception. Rather than only two diamond rings, we had three. The third came only minutes after the end of totality, when frequent TravelQuest expedition member David Bloomfield of Herndon, Virginia, got down on one knee and offered a golden diamond ring to his girlfriend, Marie Michalski. By sunset she was no longer his girlfriend — she was his fiancée.

Has it been bothering you that I wrote “the total solar eclipse of July 21, 2009,” in my opening paragraph? Wasn’t the eclipse on July 22nd? It depends. The Moon’s dark umbral shadow crossed India, Bhutan, China, and the northern Pacific Ocean on July 22nd, but when it reached our position near the end of the track in the South Pacific — just east of the International Date Line — it was the end of the day on July 21st local time. That’s right: we saw the eclipse hours after everyone else, but a day earlier!

The eclipse wasn’t the only astronomical phenomenon we enjoyed during our two weeks sailing through the Society and Cook islands. Day after day, conditions were just right for the green flash, when the last glimmer of the Sun at sunset, or the first glimmer at sunrise, turns emerald for a second due to atmospheric scattering and dispersion. I saw a personal record six green flashes at sunset during the cruise — two in binoculars, two with my naked eyes, and two through a telephoto camera lens. Actually, on one occasion I saw three green flashes in binoculars at a single sunset: two as the Sun dipped into cloud layers, then a third when it went below the ocean horizon. Several passengers reported seeing green flashes at sunrise on at least two mornings.

We also saw the very thin waxing crescent Moon just one night after the eclipse, when its age was barely 25 hours. The ultrathin crescent cradled the rest of the lunar disk bathed in earthshine — very pretty.

But the best non-eclipse celestial sight we enjoyed was the spectacular southern night sky. By definition, the Moon is nearly new whenever you go solar-eclipse chasing, so there’s no interference from moonlight at night. From our dark location in the remote Pacific Ocean, we got to see the unspoiled splendor of the center of the Milky Way high overhead. The dust lanes and clumps that show up so well in long-exposure photographs were easy to see without any optical aid at all. Alpha and Beta Centauri pointed the way to Crux, the Southern Cross, with the dark Coalsack and glittering Jewel Box nearby. Star clusters M7 and M8, along with the Lagoon Nebula (M8) and its associated cluster, were easy naked-eye objects near the zenith in Scorpius and Sagittarius. Helping to point them out with a green laser was Berkeley cosmologist Alex Filippenko, who joined Owen and me for the shipboard astronomy-enrichment program.

About 50 passengers woke up early one morning to hunt down the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The Tarantula Nebula was obvious to the naked eye in the LMC, and globular cluster 47 Tucanae was even more obvious next to the SMC. Since most of our travelers hailed from the Northern Hemisphere, it was fun to compare the “great” northern globulars M13 in Hercules and M22 in Sagittarius to their truly great southern counterparts Omega Centauri and 47 Tuc. No contest: Omega Cen and 47 Tuc put their northern cousins to shame both in terms of brightness and size.

Of course, we saw many fine non-astronomical sights as well. After all, we were sailing the South Pacific and calling on one island paradise after another. Because we needed to get to the eclipse track, which was off the beaten path for cruise ships, we visited two places seldom seen by outsiders. One was Suwarrow Atoll, population 5. We dropped off new radio equipment so the island’s caretaker and his family could communicate with the rest of the world. And on Eclipse Day morning, we passed Puka Puka, a tiny island that had never had a cruise ship visit before. Captain Zupan sounded the ship’s horn as we passed, and the beach filled with little schoolchildren in blue and white uniforms. Talking to their teachers by radio, the captain made sure they knew of the impending 98% partial eclipse they’d experience a few hours hence and how to view it safely.

All eclipses are special, but for different reasons for different people. Obviously it was very special for David and Marie. For many of the rest of us on this cruise, including me, our first experience of totality came in July 1991, during the Big One that touched Hawaii and Mexico. The 2009 event thus marked the completion of our first saros, as this eclipse was a virtual repeat of 1991’s eclipse, but a third of the way west around the planet. That’s because a little more than 18 years, the Sun, Earth, and Moon line up in almost exactly the same configuration and relative separations.

Eclipse 2009 was special for TravelQuest and Wilderness because it marked the companies’ first collaboration. It went so well that they’re doing it again in July 2010, again on the Paul Gauguin, again in the South Pacific. It’s rare that two successive solar eclipses are visible from the same part of the world, but that’s the case here. We hope you can join us for another wondrous adventure in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.