I must be crazy to fly 10K miles to risk getting clouded out. But eclipse chasers are a bit nuts. And while it was another nail biter (thick clouds still over the Sun with 30 minutes to annularity, but then they started to burn off), it was a successful trip. The three photos across show second contact (Moon just inside the Sun), mid-annularity and third contact (Moon just inside the Sun–leaving it). Then there are two slide shows of wildlife and a final slide show of the eclipse site, the people, the cloud bank that sooooo worried us and other eclipse shots. The final shot is mid-annularity. Click on it and the stretching will disappear. The video is on YouTube of both the eclipse and the safaris. I shot the stills with a Canon 12x optical, hand held, through a Mylar filter. The video was shot through a Panasonic S26 camcorder and Mylar filter (you can see that on some of the eclipse stills.) The sandwich video has wildlife-eclipse-wildlife with stills pasted into the video. The first three pictures below were taken from the video, put on full screen, photographed and sent to iPhoto. Tried to do all of this at Nakuru but the wifi was slow and occasionally the power went out. I’m the guy wearing the True Value hardware cover (good to store filters and other stuff quickly during an eclipse). We had a polyglot group (well, not me, other than my very limited KiSwahili), with Russian and Japanese being the other languages. People just appeared, and next to seeing an eclipse, showing it to people and explaining the phenomenon is as enjoyabl as well. This was my fifth annular, and I’ve seen 11 totals. Total eclipses are much more beautiful, but annular ones are pretty neat. It’s just that I usually need a very good excuse to go to one. Kenya provided that excuse.
Next total 11 July 2010–I’m heading for El Calafate, Argentina and will fly it, hoping to see it over the southern Chilean Fjords.
Boreal B[l]og 
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