Blagodarya, Bulgaria!
A perfect eclipse in the country,
where the astronomy fun never ends
2nd contact, the innermost corona, chromosphere & prominences.
The solar corona with two different exposure times.
Look at a special page for
image processing experiments!
3rd contact is approaching fast - with splendid prominences.
That was it - until 2001...!
See these (and even more) pictures with a black
background!
Or look at an earlier version.
Observers at our Shabla site, around 1st contact.
The equipment used for the eclipse pictures shown above.
That was fun!
Bulgarian papers celebrating the event the next day. The first headline
reads: "the eclipse has passed with champagne and kebaptsheta,"
the second one says: "the black Sun has burned the eyes."
Bulgaria's astronomy magazine "Andromeda", a science magazine and a
booklet on the eclipse.
Eclipse preview in the Bulgarian edition of "Micky Mouse"...
It increasingly felt like looking at an alien universe. Here we were,
sitting in a cybercafe in Varna on the sunny Bulgarian
Black Sea
coast, waiting for the great solar eclipse of 1999 in a few days time
- and there were these strange news from Germany on the screen.
When we had left Western Europe in late July, media interest in
the celestial event had just started to shift from mere curiosity to
the outright bizarre. The last I had heard was a call from British
government authorities to watch the eclipse only on TV that all
the news outlets had carried dutifully - the same madness that
had swept Indonesia in 1983 and Mexico in 1991, ruining the
experience for millions. So it was happening again now, in the
middle of a continent that thought of itself as particularly
"civilized"... But what we saw on the newsfeed from back home now,
in the last few days leading up to the eclipse, was beyond even my
wildest fantasies. People were increasingly worried about bleak
weather forecasts for E day, of course, but that was only part of
the stories.
There were spokespeople for the federal government and the trade
unions alike calling for time off for German workers during the
eclipse. There was the statement from a famous fast-food chain
that no, their employees would not be allowed to go out watching
because people would want hamburgers even in darkness. There
were numerous alerts to drivers to be careful on the road because
others might "react unusually" during the eclipse. People should
also be aware of "dark characters" that might threaten eclipse
watchers. And there was a major scandal brewing after a TV
economy magazine had declared the solar filter glasses sold by
several famous suppliers unsafe - an allegation that those
companies denied vigorously, only a handful of improperly
manufactured filters had been distributed, they claimed. Getting
those eclipse shades had become increasingly difficult in
Germany anyway as most stores were already sold out: More
than 20 million of the viewers had been distributed so far. Already
some violent incidents, with customers fighting about the last
pairs, were reported ...
Meeting Eastern Europe's astronomers
How different things were here in Varna were we - about a dozen
amateur astronomers from Germany, the Netherlands and
Northern Ireland - had joined some 50 Bulgarians, Macedonians,
Serbs and Russians for MEPCO'99, the fourth Meeting of
European Planetary and Cometary Observers. These meetings
have been held in roughly 2 year intervals since 1992, and after
three events in Germany they have now started to jump all over
the European map (number 5 is currently planned for Tenerife in
September of 2001). The invitation to
Bulgaria
had , of course, become all the more attractive as Varna was marking the
Southern limit of the path of totality for the
last total
solar eclipse of the Millennium: By going just 60 km to the North you
could be on the centerline, just after maximum eclipse and just before it
would leave the European continent forever. And hadn't the
'Bible' for this eclipse by NASA said that weatherwise "the best
prospects in Europe are found along the shores of the Black Sea"?
In contrast to neighboring Romania and Turkey the Bulgarian
tourism authorities had done little to advertise this fact, however,
and it total only a few thousand dedicated eclipse tourists had
been lured here. Likewise there was hardly any eclipse
commercialisation apparent in the streets of Varna (or other
Bulagrian cities), only days before the eclipse some filter glasses
appeared at newsstands. The main attraction seemed to be a
major techno music party, starting the night before, followed by a
pre-eclipse 'chill-out', observations of the eclipse (that would last
only seconds in Varna itself) and then some more raving... But if
you wanted to get more serious you could also book a bus tour to
Cape Kaliakra
near the centerline which was advertised in some
hotels in the resort towns further up the coast - in German only,
by the way. The average Varna resident, it seemed from the
newspaper headlines, was looking forward to the eclipse mainly
as a convenient 'rescue' from the summer heat.
Astronomy, Rhodopian style
Then again there is the
Bulgarian
astronomical scene which
manifests itself in surprising ways. A few of us had taken the
opportunity to travel to the Rhodopians mountains, in the far
South of Bulgaria, just a few kilometers from the Greek border.
Here are located both the
town of Smolyan and the remarkable
National Astronomical Observatory of Bulgaria. What a contrast
to the deserted Mongolian observatory I had stayed at last year
(see the report)! At
Rozhen NAO all
telescopes are in fine shape and in use - and the largest one was
just having its 2 meter main mirror re-coated. The instruments
are not only used by professional astronomers, by the way: Often
those are accompanied by amateurs who can pursue their own
programs. A 70 cm Schmidt camera is particularly popular, as is a
60 cm Cassegrain with a high-quality electric photometer.
Observers from the same Varna group that was also organizing
MEPCO'99 are frequent guests here, concentrating on asteroids
(esp. NEOs) and comets.
Smolyan has many attractions, too, that make the lengthy
journey there worthwile (there are no plane or train connections,
only a winding mountain road from Plovdiv). You can visit idyllic
mountain villages nearby, explore the spectacular cave of
Uchloviza (beware: the entrance is near the top of a steep
mountain you've got to scale first!) - or go to
the planetarium. With
a staff of almost 20 - among them 7 professional astronomers, all
women, by the way - it is a remarkable institution, with a
repertoire of 70 different programs. The projection and A/V
equipment is state-of-the-art, inclusing laser effects. And last but
not least the planetarium can provide nice accomodation for
visitors, a kind offer we couldn't resist. The same goes for using
their office's internet connection, finally a chance to keep up with
the news (or lack thereof) from
DS One's Braille flyby
and the Lunar Prospector
crash on the Moon. Needless to say that the
office computer runs the SETI@home
screensaver (that 'distributed computing' experiment truly is
distributed). And Smolyan seems to be pretty wired anyway: When we met
some friends of the planetarium's staff in a restaurant, each of
them not only spoke excellent English but also had an e-mail
address.
MEPCO'99
The same could be said of many of the Eastern European
particpants of MEPCO'99 (and us Westerners anyway): Staying
in touch and in some cases even working on joint projects has
gotten so much easier since the first MEPCO just seven years ago.
And the flow of information clearly goes both ways. A Macedonian
professor, e.g., was most enthusiastic to learn about freely
available image processing software (PerlDL), while we were quite
surprised by advanced efforts of Serbian meteor observers to fully
automate data taking and analysis. Other remarkable aspects of
MEPCO'99 included the unusual projection facililites that had
been installed for the meeting in Varna's city hall. There were, e.g.,
both a video projector and several computers - but no way to
directly connect them. No problem: The computer screen was just
'observed' by a video camera, and projecting electronic image files
was possible. And since the camera operator loved to pan around
quite a bit, this really spiced up the Powerpoint presentation by a
British solar researcher who had volunteered to give a
presentation on the SECIS
experiment being put up in Bulgaria
for the eclipse. (Actually it wasn't at the time - the equipment
would arrive on the site only a day before the event ...)
Quite enormous was the media interest in the meeting: Since key
organizer Veselka Radeva is already a TV personality in Varna,
both TV crews and newspaper reporters attended some sessions
in large numbers. For some reason a simple review talk I had
offered to give on the recent discovery of the
lunar sodium tail by
American astronomers had been scheduled as the very first talk
of MEPCO'99, and so it drew particular interest. It was featured at
length in some TV news - and even made the lead story of a local
newspaper! Clearly the presence of foreign astronomers - and be
they just amateurs - was something newsworthy. And it made
good advertising for the large and active
Varna astronomy group.
If only more time would have been available to meet the Eastern
Europeans outside the more or less formal conference sessions:
Since hardly one of them had been able to pay the full (all-
inclusive) conference fee, our ways always separated, not only
overnight but even for the lunch breaks (when we were escorted
into the city council's dining hall). In the end we had to more or
less insist on a joint post-eclipse party with everyone on
board - and made many new friends that night. But I'm getting
ahead of myself.
Apart from the scientific sessions of MEPCO'99 (that featured
even some presentations by professional astronomers from the
region) there were three more events included in the agenda. The
first was a daytrip to the lovely old island town of Nessebar, down
the coast. This had two unexpected spin-offs: First of all we bought
dozens of cheap (and shockingly powerful) Chinese laser pointers
that were offered there (and only there) at every corner. And
specifically for me a long quest came to an end as I found - in an
antique store, of all places, next to some old military medals and
night vision goggles - the one item I had searched for all over
Bulgaria the past week: a cable release for my eclipse camera! This
low-tech item ('Zhilo' in Bulgarian, meaning literally 'sting') was
either unknown or sold-out in all the major camera stores I had
checked in Plovdiv and Varna, rather unusual as otherwise the
supply situation in this country seemed near-perfect (another
one of many pleasant surprises awaiting Western visitors to this
hidden gem
of the Black Sea).
Exploring the Eclipse Zone
The next special activity for MEPCO's participants was a field trip
to the North of Varna, scouting for the best eclipse observing site
two days before the event. Bad weather from the week before had
gone for good, the forecast (on cnn.com) was fine, and we had no
more doubts that we would all see the eclipse. Most of the
Bulgarians were heading for the
town of Balchik,
either to an airforce base or to the coastal promenade. There would be
cold drinks provided - but only 2 minutes of totality. Why waste a full
20 seconds, we wondered, and so we asked the minibus driver and
our hosts to continue on Northwards. The main sea resorts Sv.
Konstantin i Elena (aka. Drushba), Golden Sands and Albena long
behind us, we were now in a vast agricultural area into which few
tourists ever venture. One last attraction was the Cape Kaliakra we
already knew from the trip offers in the hotels of Drushba.
Spectacular scenery, no doubt, but it could become pretty crowded
on E day (I did indeed, we later learned). Also some of our party
had quite a struggle with a dubious waiter (who actually
undercharged me, oh well...) - not the best place then.
The trip continued along the coastal road - and weren't that tents
and telescopes there in a farmyard in the village of
Kamen Briag?
Indeed: We had stumbled upon a true astronomical settlement,
inhabited by Russian professional astronomers and a gang of
international meteor observers from IMO (some of which had also
augmented the MEPCO crowd). And then three of us couldn't
believe our eyes: There was Dmitri Petrov - the same Moscow-
based astronomy educator we had met 2 1/2 years ago on the
Transsiberian Railroad on the way to the eclipse in Chita (see my
report)! Here he was again,
together with some students and a most unusual eclipse
experiment. From left-over spacecraft parts (he has connections
to the Khrunishev plant...), including a solar array and skin of one
of the Buran shuttles that never flew, he had constructed a device
to precisely measure the ambient light during the eclipse. And the
time signal was to be delivered by the electronics of a Geiger
counter he happened to own - no need to buy an extra clock,
then...
The equipment brought by the astronomers - from the famous
Sternberg Institute in Moscow - was dealing with solar physics
more directly. Two teams (one led by a woman named Galina who
had already been to nine total eclipses!) had set up sturdy
horizontal telescopes and heliostat mirrors: The typical
equipment I had encountered at so many professional solar
eclipse camps all over the world. But the key this time were
sophisticated Fabry-Perot interferometers (what's that? check
out any optics textbook!) that would be used to measure the
velocity field in the solar corona with high precision, to test
models of coronal heating by the very scientists who had now
positioned themselves in the track of totality. The team leader,
Prof. Edward Kononovich, even gave us an excellent impromptu
science talk in the searing heat about the open questions in
coronal physics. All too soon we had to carry on, though, with our
own site search. We were now just a few kilometers from the
central line, with at least 2 minutes and 20 seconds of totality to
expect. Now it was more a question of convenience where to
position ourselves.
One spot we had located on the map did indeed look perfect: an
accessible spot on the coast, even with a restaurant. But others
had found it, too: a British group was expecting 1000+ ravers
right here for yet another techno party... So on went the journey,
to the camping ground of Dobrudsha with many facilities and a
nice beach (and a mysterious 'radioactive lake' nearby). Actually it
was too nice, with ample sand - not good for our instruments. And
who could guarantee that the lights wouldn't go on during
totality, or that someone would fire rockets or light a fire to
celebrate it? The nearby quiet town of Shabla would have been a
viable spot, but a large schoolyard where a large expedition from
Rozhen Observatory was supposed to be was empty - it seemed
just too odd to simpy occupy it ourselves. After a brief discussion
the decision was nearly unanimous: Lets head for a line of trees
we had driven by, in the fields between Shabla and the coast -
there would be ample shade and noboby else. The trip back to
Varna took just one hour, but our host were worried about
possible congestion on eclipse day or police checks. Eventually we
negotiated a departure around 7:30 on the morning of August
11th.
Most of the Western Europeans (plus a Canadian geophysicist
whom I had met during the Leonids expedition of 1998 and who
had joined us by now - after an odyssey on various airplanes) had
stayed at the Bris-1 hotel, located on the Northern outskirts of
Varna. It had an excellent restaurant, a perfect 'Perseids
observatory' on the 4th floor, and frequent bus connections both
up and down the coast, making it a perfect base for either eclipse
preparations or heading for the beaches (hey, we are
amateur astronomers :-). The day before the eclipse was
spent shopping for fruits (a giant water melon sets you back just
0.25 Euros here) and 35 liters of water (in case the eclipse would
made us thirsty) and checking various websites. The forecast for
the Varna area had remained perfect, while CNN predicted
showers both for Stuttgart and Munich, the two largest German
cities in the zone of totality. Oh dear ... The
SOHO LASCO
images of
the solar corona showed a stable, exciting maximum
configuration. And Calcium images of the chromosphere from
Meudon Observatory revealed a large number of substantial
prominences: That promised an unusually exciting view, for our
bare eyes to see in less than 24 hours.
Eclipse Day!
The dash North of our minibus on eclipse day came to an abrupt
stop pretty quickly when a tire blew, but the driver completed the
repair in no time. We calmed down the eclipse novices in our party:
Such a thing always happens, don't worry. The traffic wasn't
much heavier than usually, and while there were lots of new police
checkpoints now, the officers merely looked on - more two hours
prior to 2nd contact we were back at the spot near Shabla we had
scouted out two days earlier. Joining us Western MEPCO
participants were some young Bulgarians who also didn't want to
waste a second of totality. A particularly shady tree was selected
and the telescope mounts and tripods put into position and
protected by towels from the growing heat - it must have been 35
degrees C or more. What followed was waiting under an almost
boringly blue sky: Not a single cloud was sighted here all day, and
- lacking any means of communication - we could only imagine
what was going on at the same time in Western and Central
Europe where countless amateurs just like us were frantically
hunting for holes in the cloud cover. To kill some time two of us
walked into nearby Shabla, only to find the town largely deserted,
hardly any eclipsophiles were around. Eventually we had some
early lunch at a bar, then headed back.
First contact was only at about 12:46 Eastern European Daylight
Time, and it would be 14:12 before totality came. As usual the first
hour passed pretty uneventfully while the Moon slowly krept
across the solar disk and covered a large sunspot group.
Somewhere in England, then France, then Germany the umbra
arrived, and here it was still broad daylight. But then one could
notice the light fading ever so slightly, the color of the sky and the
landscape wasn't the same anymore, and finally the changes
started to speed up. And then the shadow came! As a dark wall
towering in the West the umbra of the Moon manifested itself,
getting darker and darker. The lack of any clouds meant that the
actual motion (with twice the speed of sound) could not be seen,
but it was evident enough that something big was going to happen
pretty soon. As usual I followed the last seconds up to 2nd contact
through the viewfinder of my camera, with the filter removed. And
even before the last rays from the photosphere had vanished
behind the Moon the large prominences came into view, much
more delicate and beautiful than on the computer screen the day
before. And bright red, of course.
Since I had dared, for the first time, to work at 2000 instead of
1000 mm of focal length, the prominences loomed particularly
large. And because I was using an angle view finder I was actually
looking downwards at that time, like staring into a microscope.
The most amazing moment came now, when I lifted my view and
looked at the dark Sun directly: There was the corona, in a shape I
had never seen before. Instead of the clear East-West orientation
of the streamers that had always been present during my
previous seven clear eclipses (of 1983, 1988, 1991, 1994,
1995,
1997 and
1998),
there was now a textbook-style maximum
corona hanging in the deep blue totality sky, with streamers
going in all directions. (You can enjoy various SOHO views in
the
archive at ESTEC that also has striking solar
pictures
from many other telescopes in space and on the ground! The Meudon
and Kiepenheuer images show dramatic partial phases ...) Quickly I removed
the tele-extender from my optics to get down to the usual 1 meter focal
length and to record the corona in full. There was an overwhelming amount
of fine detail in the innermost 15 or so arcminutes all around the
dark Moon, with prominences visible all around the limb - one of
the few advantages of short eclipses when the Moon is not much
larger than the Sun. This was too much to take in in full in the less
than two minutes left, but the photographs would document the
intricate interactions between the prominences and the corona,
more complex than I had ever seen.
All too soon the chromosphere and first rays of photosphere
appeared again on the other side of the Moon, bringing totality to
a close - but the show wasn't quite over yet. "Shadow Bands!"
someone shouted a few meters away from me where a large white
bedsheet had been placed on the ground. The effort had actually
been insprired by a presentation at MEPCO'99 by Eric Strach who
had made one of the best ever
video recordings
of shadow bands
on Curacao in 1998 (it was even shown on "The Sky at Night" on
the BBC). Jumping over various optics and tripods on the
ground I arrived just in time to see the elusive atmospheric-optical
phenomenon in all its clarity, patterns of dark and light bands
rushing over the ground. It actually helped to lift the sheet and
look at it at a slanted angle: That shortened the spacing of the
bands artificially and enhanced their contrast. But then the
phenomenon faded, and most started to disassemble their
equipment - only a few diehard experts observed the 4th contact
as well, before we all headed back to Varna. And while many who
had opted to try their luck in France, Germany or Austria were
still caught in long traffic jams, we were already celebrating our
success - and planning for the future. Such as the
next total eclipse
(Southern Africa,
June
2001). The next MEPCOs. Or the next trip
to Bulgaria, a country none of us had known before and that had
given us such a wonderful dose of astronomical fun!
Daniel Fischer
First version posted August 20th / 15 pictures added August 23rd / minor
updates Aug. 26-28th / better eclipse pictures posted and some
links added Sept. 6th and 7th / pictures added to dark.html Sept. 16th.
P.S.: "Blagodarya" in the title means "thank you", of course, and if
you're interested - "slunze" is the Sun, and "zathymnenie" is an
eclipse.
P.P.S.: Many links to reports from other places can be found in the
Cosmic Mirror issues #
143 (in the sidebar of the lead story)
and 144 (in the green box)! More stories
and pictures were collected by
F.
Espenak,
G. Ewert,
the
Kufner-Sternwarte,
the
New Scientist and
and ProHosting.
Further individual reports & pictures of note came from
J. Rao
(on the Atlantic Ocean, 12 seconds after the umbra hit the Earth!),
Kern & Carlos
(corona radially filtered & enhanced!),
F. Espenak
(a superb corona composite that was even
celebrated by the BBC, plus fine wide-angle views),
S.
Teiwes,
W. Koprolin,
M.
Legros,
the
Sternfreunde OWL,
H. Clawson and
M. Aytun.
Then there is a
collection of eclipse images by meridian circles (no kidding)!
Perhaps of interest: the London Science Museum is
collecting observations
of various phenomena during the eclipse (see also an older
New
Scientist story). / A fine version of the
view from Mir
of the umbra has been published. / But there is also the department of
incredible nonsense about the eclipse, such as these pages from
GreatDreams.com
(another page from the same
source),
EnterpriseMission.com,
ORBIT
and the
Millennium Group...
Returning to reality, here are
the next eclipses
for Europe plus
detailed
maps for past & future European total ones! And all the
eclipses of
the next 10 years.