Totality with clouds, March 20, 2015, outside Tórshavn, Faroe Islands. // Credit: David J. Eicher
Well, what can I say? Our group of 50
Astronomy magazine readers, led by MWT Associates, went for totality in the Faroe Islands on Friday, March 20, 2015, as did thousands of travelers here. In the end, we did not see the eclipse. The skies simply clouded us out. But we saw the light drop down to virtually nothing, and come up again, along with some weird horizon twilight effects during totality around the edges of the sky, peeking through the cloud deck. We also saw the emergence of the Sun’s extremely slender crescent through a hole in the clouds just after totality, following the second diamond ring. The weather prospects in the area were never super promising, but you just never know. Some 20 minutes after totality, the clouds that plagued us on eclipse morning moved off. Had totality occurred 20 minutes later, we would have seen the whole thing.
Ah well. A few nights previously, we had witnessed one of the greatest auroral displays of our lives, from a position east of Reykjavik, Iceland, before coming to the Faroes. You just never know.
We’ll set our eclipse calendar ahead now to Bali next year and to the United States in 2017, an event sure to be seen by huge numbers.
I want to mention something else we’ve been talking about this week. The horrible terrorist act at the Bardo Museum in Tunis was very shocking. In 2012, just several months after the emergence of Arab Spring, our MWT group visited Tunis and the Bardo Museum. It makes us incredibly sad to see such violence at a great place that offers not only promise for the intellectual future of the world, but one of the greatest collections of ancient mosaics on Earth.
Let’s hope the world takes a turn for the better over coming months.
For all images from the trip, visit the
Online Reader Gallery.
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