English Postdoc chases the eclipse

This was sent to me from a Hubei journalist who interviewed me during the eclipse in Wuhan. It's now online and in printed form. I haven't been able to track down any photos from the journalists who were taking photos of my slightly strange setup but I'll see if I can find anything online.

英国博士后跟着日食跑

荆楚网消息 (楚天都市报) “哪里有日食，哪里就会有我的身影。”昨日上午在黄鹤楼公园，英国帅哥Jon.Shock摆 弄着专业相机，一脸得意地对周围人说。“希腊、俄罗斯、土耳其、西班牙，这些国家我都去过，当然，要不是为了看日食，我才不会去，因为我没有那么多的Money。”29岁的Jon老家在英国牛津，目前在西班牙工作，是个物理学方向的博士后。自从去年在甘肃看过日食后，就惦记着今年7月 22日的日全食。“ 这 可 是500年不遇，并不是每个人都能碰到。”他很早就在网上查询最佳观测地点，最开始他选择在上海，并于一周前从西班牙飞到那里。但后来从天气预报了解，22日当天上海的天气不好，所以Jon赶紧更换地点，乘火车于21日晚到达武汉。
Jon指了指身边的几个同行——德国的john、美国的休斯、法国的巴赫、马来西亚的阿罗约，都是在来汉的火车上碰到的。“他们和我一样疯狂。”（记者王进良 实习生胡幸).

I'll write up a full translation when I have a computer at home (still being fixed in the shop). In the meantime, feel free to google translate. The online version of this article can be found here.

Wuhan eclipse animation

Just a quick post today, with many thanks to Toomanytribbles who took my photos of the cloudy eclipse and turned them into this lovely animation. I wasn't taking these in order to get such an animation, so the timing is non-constant, but at least the contrast between light and dark is very clear in the couple of seconds between frames of totality and partiality.

Total solar eclipse in Wuhan, July 22nd 2009

I spent a frantic few days in Shanghai trying to find where and when the tropical storm was going to hit the city. Two things quickly became clear: one was that the weather websites hadn't predicted a single day correctly in the previous two weeks, and the second was that the skies of Shanghai sure seemed to be clouding up fast.

Searching for satellite data, other eclipse hunter's predictions and any weather website I could get my hands on it seemed that the best bet was going to be to head West to Wuhan. Wuhan sits around 1000 km to the West but luckily the transport system in China is remarkably good. Catching the train on the afternoon the day before the eclipse gave me not only a pretty comfortable five hour ride to the city, but also the chance to meet some fellow eclipse hunters. John, from Germany, stuck out from the crowd with bags bulging with camera equipment, videos, filters and tripods, making my single camera and solar filter rigged up from a Pringles packet look somewhat ridiculous (I did at least have a Manfrotto tripod to give me a little more credibility). John was travelling with May, who works in Shanghai but is originally from Wuhan. In addition were a couple of American TV producers who were in the country for a week or so hunting for this, the longest eclipse of the 21st century.

We got into Wuhan and all made our way to a hotel right next to Huang He Lou, the yellow crane tower, and what I thought would be a good spot to see the eclipse from. Getting a bite to eat the night before in an outdoor food market gave me a chance to indulge in some stinky tofu and an excellent dish of spicy pork before heading to bed.

I hadn't slept more than a couple of hours the night before, worrying about where I could see the eclipse from, and that night too I couldn't sleep for the expectation of what we may see the next day. Arriving into Wuhan the skies were clear and at night the stars came out, or at least attempted to poke through the light pollution of the city of ten million.

So, a little bleary eyed, but very excited we met at 6.30 the next morning to get ourselves ready for the event with plenty of time to find a position and set up shop.

Walking out of the hotel I looked up to the sun and was greeted by a wonderful morning solar halo, a fine view indeed, but a sure sign of some cirrus clouds joining us for the show.

We walked up to the temple and found a large crowd, equipped with eclipse glasses who had had the same idea. At 7.30 we were all let in and rushed around to vie for the best spots. John, the seasoned eclipse hunter discovered the best place and we set up our equipment, waiting for the first signs of occlusion.

While setting up my kit I was greeted by a never ending stream of reporters, keen to chat to the only Chinese speaking foreigner and I was asked the same dozen question for an equal number of newspapers. At one point I was also interviewed for TV but sadly shied away from giving the interview in Chinese.

As the time grew closer, the clouds moved in and it was clear that we were not going to have an easy ride. Indeed as we approached the moments before totality the clouds thickened and we were left with only a few glimpses through the patchy cloud of totality itself. I managed a few photos of the sun as the moon gradually moved across the face but it turned out to be very hard to find the sun with a zoom lens and a strong solar filter when the sun is partially blocked by clouds. The solar filter is so strong that only an unobscured sun is clearly visible. Still, I got a few shots and these were perhaps the best couple.

For totality itself the crowds around cheered as the sky darkened completely, lit only by the horizon where totality was not apparent. They seemed happy enough with the darkness and were not sad at the lack of the spectacular corona. I did my best and got a couple of shots with the zoom before changing lenses and taking in some wider angle shots to include the temple itself. I have a series of 20 or so shots which I will make into an animation as soon as possible. In the mean time, here are my efforts from the moments of totality, clouds included. These were from the clearest ten seconds or so of the five minute totality.

It was a strange mix of excitement and disappointment, mixed with not a little amusement, knowing that I'm probably one of the few people in the world who has seen three cloudy solar eclipses in a row. I will of course keep on hunting, and though I may not make it to the next showing in the Easter Islands, I'll be on the case before too long.

Shanghai as it goes by

All good to in China though this will be a quick update.

Shanghai has been mind-bogglingly, roastingly hot, hovering between 35 and 40 all of this week with very high humidity. Luckily I enjoy the heat a great deal and when I don't have to wear long trousers feel very comfortable in these conditions.

Sadly the predictions for the next couple of days are not looking good for the eclipse so I'm going to be heading off tomorrow West to Wuhan by train where the sun promises to show itself not showing itself. Wuhan looks to be even hotter than Shanghai and the heat index for Thursday is set to be a completely unreasonable 64 degrees centigrade! The heat index is supposed to reflect how the air actually feels, taking into account the humidity and other factors which affect how well your body is able to cool down. I plan on being well out of the city by then, hoping currently to head up to Beijing or Qingdao on the afternoon of the eclipse.

Apart from that I've been hugely enjoying my time in Shanghai and while I don't know the city at all, I feel very much at home in a Chinese metropolis, with the chaos, the smells, the people and the food all making me feel very settled here as soon as I arrived. I'm staying with a friend of a friend in the French concession which is a particularly pleasant part of the city, with thin tree-lined avenues and European style buildings branching off little side-streets. The chaos continues here however and there is no lack of street vendors, dodgy KTV parlours and fake designer hand-bag shops.

I've been getting my fill of exotic food whenever possible, though the heat and a few days of stomach troubles have stopped me from devouring at full throttle as I had planned. I definitely expect to get back to some old favourites in Beijing if I do end up there.

Anyway, I hope to expand some more on my thoughts on Shanghai with plenty of weird and wonderful stories when I get back to Spain in a little more than a week, with photo accompaniment but for now we're off for a quick drink on the Bund and a view of the lights of the city at night.

Solar photography, for starters

As I have mentioned before and will probably mention many times before the event, I'll be heading to Shanghai in a few weeks to go and see the solar eclipse with the longest duration of totality this century. I'll be in and around Shanghai for a couple of weeks, and have my eyes set on a few locations for the event itself, though that depends in large part on the weather.

Of course I hope not only to see the event, but also to get some good photos of it, and that requires some preparation on my part. A couple of weeks back I ordered a high grade A4 solar filter sheet and have just had a chance to cut out a part of it to make a trial filter box for my camera. I've made a simple setup with cardboard for now and plan on making something more solid for when I make the trip East. The current setup goes over the end of my 70-300mm lens which I've used on numerous occasions now for solar system photography, with moderate success.

Sadly although we are finally coming out of the period of minimum solar activity, with the first sunspots for many months (ok, there are some subtleties to that statement), right now the surface looks pretty featureless and so there's not much to search for with the new piece of kit. Still as a first try it's looking pretty good and I'll be keeping an eye on the sunspot activity over the next few weeks.

Click to view much larger versions, where some uneven features can be seen at the edges of the solar disk:

Eclipse redux

I'm now in Seoul, after an exhausting couple of days coming back from the depths of central China. All good here, though I really need a good night sleep before heading into the office tomorrow.

In summary, I didn't get to see the eclipse in it's completeness due to pretty heavy cloud cover. However, the moments of totality were still wonderful and the whole trip was well worth the tiredness, the effort, the stress of getting tickets en route, the worst of the worst squat toilets and more. It seemed that few in Pingliang knew about the coming eclipse and there were screams to be heard from around the rather impoverished area I had found to set up shop for the event.

Somehow the real time experience of a truly astronomic phenomenon is very exciting, even if I didn't see the beauty of the solar corona, the surreal experience of the light changing over a period of a minute was great. I'll see the real thing at some point, so I'm not disappointed having missed it this time.

In fact a while before the eclipse started, three local kids came up to me to see what on earth A) a foreigner was doing in their city (I didn't see a single other Westerner in four days of travels, and only one person who spoke a lick of English) and B) why on earth I was standing in the dust, looking out at nothing in particular. The kids were great and we chatted for some time. I gave them my camera to play with which they loved and I have some great photos they took of each other to put up at some point.

After the eclipse came and went I got on the train back to Baoji in Shaanxi province. As I mentioned previously I had no seat ticket, but in fact was given a seat after a while of standing. The whole journey was rather surreal from start to finish. As I got on the train 200 people turned to stare at this strange creature who had just arrived (the train was a two day train from Urumqi to Chengdu). They all started talking about me and it didn't take long for them to realise that I had some idea what they were saying. From that point on I spent a good four hours being bombarded by questions from those in the train who weren't sleeping on newspaper under the seats (mostly elderly men). Had I not been so exhausted from the last few days it would have been a treasure trove of new Chinese vocab, as I stumbled from topic to topic and we pieced things together along the way, sadly, most of the new words I heard I've now forgotten, as I could barely keep my eyes open by this point.

The next day I had another 16 hour train journey back to Beijing, which was rocky, but reasonably comfortable, and yet another good chance to meet a lot of people from around the country. If I were seriously learning Chinese I would certainly spend the weeks with my books and the weekends out in the countryside, or on short trips, practicing what I had learnt. Given such spare time I would suspect fluency would come in just a few months. Still, that'll have to wait for another lifetime.

And now, after a 5.30 start this morning I'm in Seoul, visiting a university where I'll be giving some talks and hopefully starting a new collaboration. I'm in a very nice flat, not far from the department, and I'm feeling a good deal better than the last time I was in Korea, suffering from two weeks of nasty flu.

For now I've just dealt with one of my photos, from Kong Tong Shan, the famous Daoist and Kung Fu mountain which I had planned on seeing the eclipse from, but, as explained in the previous post, managed to muck up my timing completely. Anyway, it's a rather stunning temple complex, built on and into this beautiful mountain, overlooking the flats of Pingliang. Not the greatest photo I've ever posted, but this one should really be seen for real

The Englishman who went up a mountain and came down a mountain

So, I was up at 5.30 this morning to head to the mountain I was going to see the eclipse from. The eclipse was due at 10.24 according to the website I'd read it from. However, having made it to the top in reasonable time, 10.24 came and went, and the faint glow of the sun showed no signs of dimming.

Having just found an internet cafe I now see that very cleverly the time was quoted as UTC, not local time. I simply didn't consider that one would write an eclipse time in anything but local time! So, this means I have another 6 hours to wait, which may just give time for the clouds to move a little.

Still, I've seen a rather beautiful, sacred mountain this morning, with stunning panoramas, gorgeous pagodas, and piped music blasting out to remove any feelings of authenticity the place may once have had. That said it was stunning and I'm glad I  made the journey here, if only for that.

Off to read some papers now (no cafes here to work in, so I'll sit in the lobby of the hotel for a while) and will head out again later to try my luck once more. After this I have a four and a half hour train ride with no seat (all the seats were sold out by the time I arrived here and there was no way to book the ticket at my previous location). So, I'll be standing till around 1 in the morning, crash in a hotel for the night and then take off on another 16 hour train ride for Beijing tomorrow evening. Adventures, adventures!

Eclipse hunting, part II

Well, I've finally arrived in Gansu province, in a small town called Pingliang after around 21 hours on trains. I'll be doing the same in reverse shortly. Sadly, weather forecasts for the region tomorrow are not looking good so I think my chances of seeing anything are remote, perhaps even more so than I am. Tomorrow at around 6 am I'll make my way to Kong Tong mountain, make the four hour walk to the summit, and see what I can see from there. Fingers are firmly crossed, but I'll just have to take what I get.

In the mean time it's been a fairly strange, interesting experience all around. I spent a day in Baoji, a city of around 4 million, walking around for a while, firstly panicking that nobody would sell me a ticket back to Beijing (you can never buy a ticket more than 5 days in advance here and pre-Olympics that has been scaled back to 3 days!) and than being amused by the stares of the many many locals who would follow me around, wondering what on Earth I could be up to in their little neck of the woods. I have a few photos of the People's park, including the most depressing fair ground I've ever come across.

This morning's ride to Pingliang has also been pretty strange, with non-stop stares from many people. Not, apparently amused, or moved, simply puzzled, with a look letting on little of what they were thinking.

Pingliang is in the East of Gansu province, and it's my first time in this region of China. My first impression is that the people are quieter than any Chinese I've ever met, not that they don't say much, but that they are soft-spoken, and after the hurricane of voices from Beijing to Baoji, this is no bad thing! Needless to say that these few days have been a great chance to speak Chinese.

So, after tomorrow morning, I head back down the mountain, photos captured, or not, get a train back to Baoji, spend a night back in the hotel, then in the afternoon I take another 16 hours on the train to Beijing. In Beijing I will have around 24 hours before I head to Korea where I'll be working for a couple of weeks. I'm really very much looking forward to this and am interested in seeing the contrasts to the Chinese departments I've been spending time in recently.

Anyway, with e-mails to check and various things to sort out, I'll have to leave it at that for now. I expect to next write from Korea...

Eclipse hunting

It's a strange kind of trip where you don't know where you're going, but you know when - I mean by this that the destination is a time, and not specifically a place. My destination is some time around 10.30 am on Friday the first of August, at which point a swathe of land from Eastern China through Mongolia and Russia and up into Greenland and Canada will gradually become covered in darkness.

I've never had the chance to see an eclipse, other than through the dense clouds of a Cornwall morning, some time back in 1999, so I thought that I would take the opportunity to go eclipse hunting this time in a somewhat more exotic location. I say I don't know where I'm going because my trip is only half booked. Today at 5 pm I will take a train to Baoji, some 15 hours West, arriving tomorrow morning, at which point I will find an internet cafe, look at the weather forecasts for Friday and plan stage two.

Currently, as I mentioned before, my plan is to head to Pingliang, though the forecast at the moment is not looking great. My second best option may involve heading another 15 hours further North West, which is going to make coming back in time to catch my flight to Korea somewhat tricky, so I have to play this carefully. Unfortunately it's impossible to book train tickets more than five days in advance here, so I haven't even been able to secure a return trip from Baoji. This is rather crucial, as I will only have around 24 hours to play with!

So, that's the essence of my trip. The idea of seeing an eclipse from the top of a legendary mountain in a distant province in central China makes my head spin just thinking about it. I really hope that conditions are good on Friday, but whatever happens, I have an exciting, unknown trip ahead of me for the next few days...wish me luck!