Turkey  - 3/29/2006
At 9:00am we headed out eclipse-hunting, and chose a perfect beach just beyond Side in a small town called Kumkoy, directly on the line of totality as estimated by the official Mike Arida GPS. We set ourselves up on the beach with our cameras, binoculars, welder's glass, towels, sunscreen, and hats. We all spent some time playing with our cameras, doing exposure tests, and (of course) taking pictures of each other squinting into cameras, lying on the beach staring up through cameras, making faces behind welding glass, etc etc; the traditional pastimes of techies priming themselves for astronomical events. Around us on the beach at various distances were other groups of eclipse-watchers, including a particularly large group from Hungary. We took it in turns to walk into town to look around and shop and use the facilities; as Karen, Koji and I returned from our trip the eclipse was just getting under way, with the first tiny bite taken out of the sun. Mike's family had joined us by this time; Aynur and Joseph Ali, plus Aynur's mother, oldest sister, and nephew Amek. Excitement grew as the sun got more obscured from the bottom up by the encroaching moon. The daylight got dim well before totality, and the wind picked up.

The total solar eclipse lasted 3 min 45 sec at our location. It was startling and uncanny, and no amount of reading had prepared us for it. We saw jewel-like solar coronae and bright prominences against a clear purple-black sky, with Venus and Mercury also brightly shining. The horizon was rosy throughout.

During the eclipse we were all shouting and whooping, making our attempts at astro-photography but also taking plenty of time to just enjoy the experience. I took several eclipse pictures lying on my back with Holli's tripod on my chest, which came out surprisingly well. (I also took some before-and-after pictures of the solar crescent in the same configuration with welders' glass in front of the lens.) Ruya, ever the documentary-maker, was videoing our reactions and only half-watching the eclipse itself. We saw the diamond ring at third contact (the first gleam of sunlight coming through the lunar mountains), and then all too soon it was over. The bright solar crescent returned and waxed, the strong wind died down, and eventually at around 3pm the Eclipse Team packed ourselves up and moved on.

We visited Alanya, with a brief excursion into a cave and then a climb to a high fortress from the Seljuk period (11C-12C AD); a tall, rambling medieval wall, with a panoramic view of the coastline and the Taurus mountains. Inside the wall we found a Byzantine church, cisterns, and the ever-useful execution platform.