They told us we would be up early for the eclipse, with first contact beginning a short time after seven in the morning. But some of us had had no sleep for more than two days, and unfortunately it took a major effort to get me up — your editor almost caused one of the buses to be late setting off for Lion Hill, but I scrambled into repair and we set off for a 20-minute journey to a high ridge running along the hill, overlooking Lake Nakuru, where perhaps 75 people from the Astronomy group and several others (from France and Denmark) were stationed with cameras and filters, ready for the sky show.
The sky was mostly clear, and we could look one direction to see Lake Nakuru (with its famous pink flamingoes) and the other to see a wide swath of the Great Rift Valley, which runs from where we were way down south into Tanzania, and marks several areas of recovery of the earliest known hominid fossils. This cradle of creation made a fantastic spot to see one of the great shows of nature.
The eclipse was fantastic. We had just a few small, scattered clouds under a bright sky as the Sun rose and a short time later we registered the first little bite of the Sun’s disk. Our group’s members grew in excitement as a greater percentage of the Sun continued to disappear. By the time second contact came at 8:24 a.m. local time, there were screams of joy all along the ridge and we had a perfect, thin ring of sunlight visible around the Moon’s edge. It was the prettiest annular eclipse I have ever seen, partly because a thin veil of clouds rolled in during the second half of the 8-minute, 32-second annularity, and we could see the eclipsed Sun visually with the eye alone for brief seconds through the layer of cloud. It was magnificent! Editor's note: The image above was submitted to our Online Reader Gallery by Hannes Pieterse.
By mid morning we left the ridge and started immediately on a game drive back to Lake Nakuru. This was a great way to continue the day. Not only did we get a close-up look at the flamingoes, but we saw numerous baboons, vervet monkeys, spotted hyenas, white rhinoceroses, warthogs, zebras, giraffes, African buffalo, bushbucks, impalas, oryx, gazelles, dik-dik, and numerous bird species, all set against the beautiful savannah peppered with acacia trees. What a magnificent setting! I shot numerous photos and videos of the beautiful creatures and will post them on our Web site upon my return to Milwaukee.
Tonight I will speak to the group about many recent advances in astrophysics and cosmology, from dark matter to galaxy dynamics to the fate of life on Earth to planetary origins. Then, tomorrow, we’ll be off again for Nairobi to fly to the greatest game reserve of them all, the Masai Mara.
View and submit images of the eclipse in our Online Reader Gallery.
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Photo credit: Hannes Pieterse