"Wow, that's huge!"
The M/S Norwegian Seain San Juan Harbor.
"Wow, that's small!"
Our cabin (#3105).
Notice the crocodile.
A land bridge on Aruba.
The kids got their feet in the ocean for the first time here.
On Aruba they plant cactus for fences.
The hardcore astronomy crowd.
Twilight at 2pm as totality nears.
Here's a picture of the total phase of the eclipse, taken by the ship's photographers. I think it's pretty good considering they normally just do portraits, and that it's scanned (thanks, Dave!) from a print.
St. Thomas. It's even more beatiful than...
Home.
[About My Pictures]
Planning, sort of
I always wanted to see a total eclipse, and a couple years ago I read that there was going to be one in the Caribbean on February 26th, 1998. So I suppose I could've started and planning and saving back then, but I bought a car and 104 cases of beer instead. Then this January I put the whole deal on my credit card, and we took a seven-day cruise aboard Norwegian Cruise Lines' Norwegian Sea (formerly the Seaward). [update 10/25/06: The Norwegian Sea is now the Star Cruise Lines SuperStar Libra, and sails the Arabian Sea off the coast of India.]So we're off...
We flew into San Juan, Puerto Rico. We saw only a little of San Juan between the airport and the boat dock. It's mixed, beautiful and slummy. It looked like there's a lot of concern about burglary: people have iron grillwork enclosing their apartment balconies, which makes it easier to climb up to the next floor, so the neighbors above have it too, and so on to the fifth or sixth floor and sometimes higher.Barf night
The kids both had a brief bout of sea sickness on Monday night but after we gave them Dramamine - and had room service take away the wastebasket - everybody was fine. (There were two former astronauts aboard but I didn't get a chance to really talk to them. I wanted to ask if rolling seas were more or less barf-inducing than zero gravity.) The big cruise ships all have stabilizers nowadays, big retractable wings with active flaps that almost eliminate roll. They do nothing about pitch, however, and our cabin was almost in the nose of the ship. I have since learned that some ships (among them the SS Norway) have both fore and aft stabilizers that also suppress pitch somewhat, so next time maybe we'll take one of them.Also, the Norwegian Sea displaces a mere 42,000 tons (slightly smaller than the Titanic), so it does not have the continent-like inertia of some of the newest cruisers that are in the 100,000 ton range. I think any day now it'll occur to the cruise lines that they could simply start building aircraft carriers and eliminate the hassles of airports, customs, immigration, etc. for their customers. Just be real sure you've got your seat belt fastened and your tray table in the upright position when that 747 hits the catch-wire.
Cruising
Anyway Tuesday was all day at sea and everybody was used to the movement of the ship by then. In fact the kids had a blast being sloshed around in the swimming pool.Wednesday we took a quick tour of Aruba where we visited a neat land bridge formation and the kids got their toes in the ocean for the first time. We didn't get off in Curacao but it's got a beautiful harbor.
Thursday: eclipse day
Thursday was all day at sea again. The weather cooperated, although there was some suspense about that since the only cloudy rainy weather of the week was that morning. The ship poured on the steam and got to sunshine before noon, though, so the captain was out on the pool deck in the afternoon accepting congratulatory handshakes from elated astronomy geeks and saying "That was just part of the buildup." (The crew is all Norwegian; the captain's name is Odd Strom.)The hardcore eclipse-chasers were staking out their territory on the upper decks from sunrise, I think (I certainly wasn't up). It was a forest of tripods and cameras and telescopes like I've never seen. Fortunately it's a big boat so there was still room for us amateurs to stand around, although it was slow going for the staff to bring us our margaritas (oh, the sacrifices I make for Science).
Starting at noon we spent a couple hours looking through dark filters at the partial phase of the eclipse. At about 2:10 pm was the beginning of the total phase, which eclipse geeks call "second contact". When the eclipse is 99% total there's still a lot of sunlight, and your eyes have had time to adjust, so it still basically looks like daytime. But when the last bit of the sun's surface slips behind the moon it gets almost as dark as midnight in a matter of seconds. Once it's completely total, it's safe to view with the naked eye, and it's a sight I won't forget.
On the three decks where you could see sky there were about twenty-two hundred people all simultaneously going "OHHHHH WOW!" or the equivalent in Norwegian, Spanish, Tagalog or whatever. I won't go on too much trying to describe it -- the sky was a very deep purplish-blue, not quite black but the stars and planets (Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Mercury) were visible. The moon itself, though, surrounded by the brilliant corona, was the blackest black possible, like a hole in the sky. No picture you see will do it justice. We goggled in awe at this for 3 minutes 40-some seconds, then it was "third contact" and time to put the filters on again, or have the crescent sun as a permanent feature of your retina.
