What a tough trip, Frank and I went up to Michaels house on Wednesday evening at about 6pm, we went up to Dublin airport and got the 10.30pm (approx) to Moscow, it took about 3.5 hours and when added to the 3 hours time difference it was about 6am getting into Moscow airport, after taking about an hour to get through visa checks and baggage we had a little food and waited around (it went fairly quickly) for the 11.45 am flight to Novosibirsk. I was unable to sleep in any of the flights so by that time I was starting to keel over, we arrived in Novosibirsk at about 6pm, we got an hour long taxi journey to the hotel where our Greek friends were waiting for us. We checked in, got cleaned up and had some good food at a nearby restaurant, we discussed plans on what to do next day for the eclipse.
Friday morning we woke up to some broken clouds, all looking pretty good, we met up with the Greek lads at their hotel and we headed off to the north side of the lake. On the way their the clouds started to thicken up and I have to say at that stage it looked like our luck had ran out. When we got to the site, it was fairly mostly cloudy, we discussed going back to the city but decided to give it 15 minutes or so to see what the clouds would do as it appeared that they were getting a little lighter. After a small while we all agreed the clouds were becoming a little less dense with more blue sky appearing. About an hour before first contact it completely cleared, we were all amazed to be honest, we saw first contact, totality and stayed right through to the end at 4th contact.
This year the surroundings to me appeared a little brighter at totality compared to Turkey 2006 eclipse, and baileys beads were alot less pronounced, there were some nice prominences there, similar to the 2006 eclipse, the corona looked a little similar to 2006 but maybe not as pronounced, I don't know if that's just our eyes not been given as much time to adapt or was the background sky a little brighter, the big thing was the time, that 2 minutes went like a flash, ALOT quicker then ~3.5 mins 2 years ago, very noticeable, you had alot less time to get pictures as it was over before you knew it so this time around I have alot less pics taken. At mid totality, a flock of birds left the trees and flew directly across the eclipsed Sun, its looked really cool. As the Sun was 30 degrees above the horizon at mid totality, you had the optical illusion of a physically big eclipse, like the big moon you might see near the horizon, that black disk looked bigger then 2 years ago, it made viewing it alot easier then say if it was directly above.
We headed back to the hotel and by the time we were back in the city, the sky had clouded over again, we had a 4+ hour window of clear sky centred on the eclipse, a miracle if ever I saw one.
We all knew this location was a 50/50 chance but we also knew it wasn't in the middle of some snow/rainy/monsoon season so we knew we had some sort of a chance, weather there was variable over the days we were there but on most afternoons it did have broken cloud. Insects were not a problem there, there weren't swarms of mosquitoes to be seen and the Russian people were great. The airline S7 had what is probabily the best food I've ever seen on an airline and were mainly on-time. Moscow was fab, Red Square and the Kremlin was super, no hassle there.
One thing I would take away from the 2006 and now 2008 eclipses is that an eclipse with less then 2 mins totality is not worth a very difficult journey, almost!.
It gives me a serious appreciation of the China 2009 eclipse which is over 6 mins long at maximum and am now seriously considering going to it.
I have some pics which I must get together and will put them up over the coming days.
Roll on 2009!!!
