|
It was mostly broken cloud cover over Willemstad in the Island of Curacao
of the Nederlands Antilles since I had arrived on Monday 23rd
February 1998. It was very clear before sunrise
on the morning of the Eclipse, giving me a beautiful view of the
crescent Venus. However, the sky became completely overcast after
sunrise and remained so while we traveled by bus to Christoffel Park
to get to the site at "Boca Tabla" chosen by the "Capital Area
Astronomer group" for Observations. The site, within walking distance
of north-eastern coast line of the island was fairly windy.
I setup on the ridge, although it was slightly more windy hoping to
record the shadow pass over the island using the video camera. The
sky was soon perfectly clear. This fast moving band of clouds had
past over Curacao and was over Aruba around the time of the Eclipse,
but they too had a lucky hole for brief period during Totality. The 3m
30sec of Totality was predicted to start at 14:11:27 and end at
14:14:55 | 
|
|
My first attempt at photography through the 3.5-inch Questa
with a Topcan camera I borrowed from CMU, gave me some nice pictures of
Solar prominences seen during Totality. I did not expose long enough
for the full corona since the field of view though the Questa is only
1.6 times the Suns diameter. I also watched the eclipse more than
concentrate on photography and therefore missed taking photographs of
the Diamond ring etc. I anyway expected this to be difficult without a
power drive for the camera to forward the film. I also could not use
the clock drive since the altitude of the Sun was 60-degrees during
totality and the camera hits the Questa mount at about 45 degrees when
setup AltAzm. The geographic latitude of the site was just 12.4
degrees North.
This time I had traveled close to the center line since the first two
Eclipses I saw from close to the edge, in Boliva on 1994 Nov 3rd and
in India on 1995 October 24th when traveling with the expeditions
organized by David Dunham and Wayne Warren. It was nice to see a much
longer eclipse, however the Baily's beads, Diamond ring phenomena are
clearly more spectacular close to the edge.
|
|
|
This is a large prominence with a jet sticking out of it.
These initial attempts at scanning do not reproduce what I see on the photos.
The scanner seems to be not optimized to reproduce small bright regions
on images which are almost totally black.
|
|
|
Curacao is an island which gets many tourists during winter. The estimated
2000 who came to see the Eclipse just replaced the high spending standard
tourists with astronomers who don't spend that much. The Holiday Beach hotel
where I was staying tried hard to sign persons up for a pre-Eclipse party on
the night before. They couldn't understand why they got low attendance.
| 
|
|
The tourist board took a lot of effort to give publicity about the
Eclipse. They sold T-shirts, hats and beach towels with the Eclipse
logo and distributed information books for and posters for the
children. However they advised that children particularly, shouldn't
look directly at the Sun even during totality. They were to use
the Mylar glasses or watch on TV. An astronomer close to my site
placed a portable TV on my table since he wished to record the
broadcast. This attracted the security personal to my site since they
wished to view the eclipse as advised by the govt. I don't think any
of them looked directly during Totality. An opportunity of an lifetime
missed for all of them. They were shocked to see me look at totality
through my Binoculars without even a filter ...
The Nederlandse Antillen government issued a special set of 3 stamps with eclipse views and
a different higher value 3-D stamp on a souvenir sheet. The 1.10 Guilder stamp
have solar prominences pointing inwards :-)
|
|
|
Tuesday night was the last night of Carnival. The procession took about
2.5 hours to go past any place on the route. It was a mixed bag of floats
from different commercial institutions on the island with many of the
employees taking part in fancy dress. Not on a grand scale like I
expect in Rio, but not bad for a small island. Some of the floats used the
eclipse as a theme, and they even had one with the Space Shuttle and models
of the Hubble Space Telescope. Must have been a high tech company.
|
|
Visited the Hatu caves close to the airport on Wednesday morning. Not
the best I have seen, but OK. Some of the structures were nice, but
no photography was allowed except at one site. In the past the caves
had been used by slaves who lit fires, and the caves seem to have
undergone a major cleanup effort which was not all that successful.
| 
|
|
An interesting place close to downtown Willemstad is a Platoon bridge
which is used for pedestrian traffic, but swung to aside a number of
times to let ships through into the harbor. When the bridge was closed
one needed to take a ferry. It was nice to stay on the bridge while
it was opening. On the night of the eclipse I saw the Eclipse
celebration party fireworks from a moving bridge. The fireworks went
on that day a number of occasions very late into the night as it had
on the last night of the carnival.
|
|
