Sky-gazers get excited over solar eclipse
Print Edition
THOUSANDS flocked for a glimpse of the solar eclipse yesterday, with the most intrepid enthusiasts swooning over spectacular sights in a frozen Arctic archipelago and aboard a plane above remote Nordic islands.
A group of 50 die-hard Danish eclipse watchers paid 15,800 kroner (US$2,261) each to watch the event miles above the Faroe Islands from a Boeing 737 chartered by a science magazine.
“It was so beautiful, I think it was the most beautiful solar eclipse I’ve ever seen,” John Valentin Mikkelsen, a 63-year-old teacher from the Danish city of Aarhus said.
“We saw Baily’s beads,” he said, referring to a light show caused by the moon’s rugged surface allowing sunlight to shine through in some places during a total eclipse.
The Faroe Islands and Norway’s Arctic Svalbard archipelago were the only places on Earth where the less than three-minute total eclipse was visible.
“We had clouds ... but it was still fantastic,” said Ole J. Knudsen, an astrophysicist from Denmark’s Aarhus University, who watched from hills high above the Faroes’ capital Torshavn.
“For 20 to 30 seconds the sky was covered and it became dark and there was a collective shock that you could hear from all the spectators,” he said.
More than 8,000 tourists had gathered in the Faroes, a Danish autonomous territory in the North Atlantic.
The views were equally breathtaking in remote Svalbard’s main town Longyearbyen, where the population of 2,000 had tripled ahead of the event.
To a soundtrack of yelping sled dogs, Kathy Biersdorff, from Calgary in Canada, and her companions gleefully yelled the names of the eclipse phenomena into the bracing minus 20 degrees Celsius morning air.
An eclipse of varying degrees was first visible across northern Africa, most of Europe, northwest Asia and then the Middle East.
The next total solar eclipse visible from Europe is not due until August 12, 2026.
Another celestial phenomenon also occurred yesterday. Earth’s satellite appeared as a “supermoon,” which happens at its closest point to our planet, its perigee.
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