Andrew Betts

The day of the solar eclipse arrives, and I find myself and Coombi (Basil’s five year old daughter) the only people home when Mike and family arrive to accompany us the the eclipse. My map shows the eclipse happening at 13:16, but I don’t realise this is GMT, and panic Mike and gang into leaving immediately. Basil, Chico, Simon and David arrive home soon after, and we all get into Basil’s 4x4 for the drive to a suitable viewing area. We arrive with plenty of time, despite some erratic driving from Basil, who has no problem treating a single lane road as a dual carriageway, provided there doesn’t appear to be anything coming in the opposite direction.

We arrive in plenty of time, and stop at a service station for some snacks and refreshments - as is everyone else in the country, it seems, because the shop is crammed and the stuff is dissappearing from the shelves almost as fast as the shopowners can restock it.

Driving on to a nearby country club in Centenery, well within the area of totality, we only have to wait until the show starts. About an hour after we arrive the moon begins it’s slow progress across the sun, and at about ten to three I realise I’m no longer feeling hot in the glare of the sun. It’s still just as bright (as far as I can tell anyway) but there is much less heat.

I wander up to a ridge to get a better view, and by ten past three, it is noticably darker and cooler. Birds begin dusk calls, and I feel like I’m still wearing sunglasses enen though I’m not. 3:16 arrives, and the mountainous horizon suddenly goes dark. A few seconds later, it’s as if somebody is turning down the dimmer switch on the sun - it goes from a sort of late-afternoon-sun brightness to almost complete darkness in the space of about ten seconds. The solar corona becomes visible, creating a spectacular ghostly flare effect around the dark shilloetted disk of the moon.

Three minutes and twenty seconds later, it’s all over, and after a short and equally spectacular “diamond ring” effect, we almost instantaneously return to late-afternoon brightness. It takes a further hour for the sun to regain its full brightness and heat, as the moon moves slowly off the other side.

My pictures don’t come out, unsurprisingly. I have got some nice before, during and after shots of the surroundings though.

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