Eclipse Day - Getting There and Setting Up

After a brief few hours of rest on the Saturday night, my alarm woke me up right at 1:00 a.m. July 11th.  I immediately flipped on the night-light, and telephoned Joanne and Murray Paulson in their room with a resounding "Time to get hot!" (we had agreed that the first one up would call the other as a back-up to our alarms).  We assembled in the lobby just after 2:00 a.m. for our flights to the atolls.  In our Ring of Fire Expeditions group there were 41 of us going to Hikueru; the Haorangi ("Hao") group consisted of 61 eclipse chasers.  Our 2-hour flight departed at approximately 4:00 a.m.
Before leaving the hotel i had quickly checked the satellite infrared loops and saw that the predicted low and middle clouds were moving in over our observation sites.  Hikueru is approximately 740 kms east of Faa'a, Tahiti airport.  The picture at the right shows the cloud conditions about 75 - 100 kms before landing in Hikueru.  Notice the relatively clear area behind the foreground clouds; that is the best we could hope for.  If we would be fortunate enough to have an "hole" over us during totality (beginning 8:37:11.1 local time and lasting 4 minutes 19.1 seconds) then we would count ourselves lucky.

We landed just after sunrise (6:02 a.m. local time) and proceeded to our observing site which was located near the spartan airport facilities on the west side and well away from the airstrip. Some of the local folks were out to greet us including the municipal police chief.

The forty-one of us quickly spread out parallel with the airstrip over perhaps 100meters.

Under some of the coconut trees we discovered colonies of hermit crabs which gathered at the base of the tree.  Maybe they knew something we didn't.

I took up my position at the southern end of the line of observers and into the sheltered area, watching out that i wasn't directly under the release trajectory of a coconut bomb.  The tress screened me from the full effects of the wind and lessened vibrations to the camera.

I spread a double bed-sheet on the ground, weighted-down with coconuts and marked out with 50 cm. squares.  In the event of shadow bands before or after totality i had hoped to capture them on video or stills.

So here i am with my simple set-up.  A Canon SX 20 on a Slik tripid and my 12 x 36 image stabilized binoculars, both with homemade filters using Baader solar film with a density rating of 5.0.  Unfortunately, the sky was not looking good.  In my next blog entry i will show the few pictures i did manage to capture of the eclipsed Sun in its partial phase.