We had all been Shetland-newbies then, bewildered by the fact that at 8 a.m. on a Monday morning in the Islands' capital there seemed to be no way to get anything like a breakfast and that a gas station »Open 24 Hours« was closed without notice. While seeking shelter from a rain shower and sharing our amusement over the truly relaxed lifestile here, we had never talked about what drew us here in the first place. We would have found out then that it was the same rare phenomenon: an annular eclipse of the Sun that would happen here (as well as in some other island groups, the Scottish mainland, Iceland and Greenland) five days later and just after sunrise. It was well known that the chances for clear skies were remote at best, in the Shetlands as everywhere else where the eclipse would be annular and travel would be possible, but Holloway & Ainsworth were among the very few who wanted to try to improve their chances a bit by chartering a boat.
Since a certain encounter with »Boris« while chasing the previous annular eclipse off Mexico's Pacific coast one year earlier (see this detailed account) I was understandably skeptical about astronomy from small boats in the open sea, and so the thinking in our group (8 'veteran' umbraphiles, mostly from the African expeditions in 2001 and 2002) had been to rather try our luck on the roads. Shetland's »Mainland«, i. e. the largest island, had the advantage of a spider web of roads on which one could move about 100 km, esp. North/South, and we also figured that having the annularly eclipsed Sun at almost 4° elevation (compared to the Scottish mainland's 0-1°) would be an advantage. At the same time the Shetlands would be close to the edge of the zone of annularity, promising more exciting Bailey's Beads than the more centrally located Iceland.
As so often before, an eclipse had drawn us into a place about
which we knew next to nothing and where we might not have
travelled otherwise in a long time. Before setting out on the
27-hour journey to get there from Germany (with two different
low-cost airlines and a ferry) we had learned mainly that it would
be cold and that there would be a stiff breeze almost all the time -
so strong in fact, that there were no trees. Culturally the
Shetlands would be some mix of Scotland and Norway, it was said,
there would be far more sheep than people (only some 22,000 of
the latter in fact) and the main attraction would be numerous
birds. Sure, there even was an astronomical association here, but
it was a 'virtual' one, with no actual site to visit. Well, at least there
seemed to be clear skies some time - though no dark ones now, as
we were at 60° latitude.
One piece of advance information had certainly been true: There were really no trees here, only endless meadows, full of sheep, or bogs, all in a seemingly endless rolling terrain - endless, that is, until you suddenly find yourself at the edge of a breaktaking cliff, sometimes over 100 meters high. It is difficult to describe the fascination and actual beauty of such a barren landscape, dotted only here and there by a few houses, but within hours we had all begun to immerse ourselves into this wondrous world without hurry. I was also true that the weather here isn't exactly the best for the astronomy-minded, but it uses to change so often during a single day, from fog to clouds to sunshine and back, that everything still seemed possible. And the ever-changing cloud pattern also fitted such landscape very well that had a lot to do with water.
Before coming ashore we hadn't done much planning sightseeing-wise: Our main concern had been, lacking detailled topographical maps, that there wouldn't be enough accessible spots with unobstructed views towards the Northeast. These fears immediately turned out to be unfounded as the topography is very gentle, and so we got into exploring Mainland for its own sake quickly. Soon enough we found out that the 5½ days we had given ourselves for the tourist part would not nearly be enough to explore every interesting corner of even this Mainland. And it were the birds indeed that would soon blow us away: Sometimes their sheer number would be simply overwhelming, e.g. when crusing with a small boat underneath the cliffs of Noss island with its vast colonies of gannets and guillemots. Or it would be the charm of the surprisingly tiny puffins with their colorful beaks that kept the photo- and videographers busy for hours, time and again.
Sometimes the Shetlands would mix already extreme landscape types in an even more extreme manner. Take the Hermaness reserve on the far end of the isle of Unst, for example, which we visited one day (thanks to an efficient system of car ferries). Here you walk or rather stumble for hours through a pretty wet bog, amidst scores of breeding bonxies (as the locals call the giant skua seagulls), steadily gaining altitude. Suddenly there is a strip of meadow full of sheep - and yet another few meters onwards there are dramatic cliffs falling off over 100 meters, inhabited by uncounted gannets and other bird species. In another spot you find an island (St. Ninian's) connected to the mainland only through a sandy beach (which in this case is rather called a tombolo). And in many places spectacularly shaped rocks, often with arches, surround the islands in the sea. Add to that the constantly changing lighting, and one could come back again and again ...
While nature (some of the rocks here are billions of years old, by the way) and wildlife may dominate the overall impression of the Shetlands, a major addition to their charm are the people. Already on the inbound ferry I had met a Shetlander who was soon introducing me to all kinds of interesting trivia, including a long list of potentially helpful phone numbers of friends. One evening we first ended up at a praticing session of the Fiddlers Society (where the strange foreign guests were the only spectactors but welcome nonetheless) and later in the leading music bar, »The Lounge«. There soon enough an enthralling session broke loose, with more and more patrons joining the concert, some of them apparent local celebrities. In still another surprise development, our group was also on the way to become media stars as we kept running into TV crews - not only did we appear on all evening news shows the day before the eclipse, but soundbites of mine would also turn up on the radio and in newspapers ...
The night before the eclipse was pretty much overcast - if you call it a night at all; locally the half-darkness is known as 'simmer dim' (as is an excellent beer from Great Britain's northernmost brewery on Unst, by the way). As we had chosen this particular island for its network of roads, the obvious question was now, where to head. An enticing strip of muted pink light close to the northern horizon, plus vague advice from the meteorological office, relayed through a local journalist, eventually got us moving around 3 a.m. It was still one hour til sunrise, and another 45 minutes later annularily would come. As we raced towards the northernmost point on Mainland one could drive to (the ferry to the next island, Yell, would not operate for another 3 hours), it was obvious that there was more traffic than usual. Still not much of course, but an astonishing number of taxis, on similar missions as ours ...
Soon it was clear that there was no way to get ourselves underneath the clear strip - it must have been hundreds of kilometers out to sea, even way beyond the northernmost large island Unst, where some moderate eclipse-related events were to take place right now. Thus the race for clear skies came to an end in North Roe, at the Burra Voe, some minutes before sunrise. And what a sunrise it would be! The cloud cover above our heads was solid, but it was cut off like with a knife in some one degree elevation, while the horizon was again cloudy. But in between the clouds the sky was near-perfectly clear: As soon as the upper limb of the Sun appeared in this cloud-free strip, it was so bright one couldn't look at it without some filtering. Various air layers caused dramatic distortions of the Sun's shape, and in the viewfinder of a camera behind a strong telephoto lens I thought I even saw some fleeting green segments now and then.
This sight alone was worth some effort (though on a normal day one might not have gotten up for that, at 4 a.m. :-) - but there was more to come, of course. Soon enough of the Sun had risen into the clear strip that the segment 'bitten' out already by the Moon was evident. Due to the unusual geometrical conditions during this eclipse, with the antumbra actually reaching towards us from behind the North Pole, the missing part was on the right-hand side of the Sun. The stunning sight remained with us for some 12 minutes, then all of the Sun had disappeared again behind the still-solid cloud field above us. With only ½ hour to go until annularity there was nil hope for a view of the ring, so what do you do now? Some of the video people in the group set up wide-angle time lapse sequences with fixed aperture stops to document the overall dimming of the sky, others headed for a nearby hill for a Bigger Picture.
To the naked eye, the fading light with the eclipse progressing behind the clouds was evident but not overly dramatic (like it is during a cloudy total eclipse, as witnessed once, in Finland in 1990). Still the barren landscape with just a few puzzled sheep seemed now even more out of this world, with the unusually dark grey sky above it and a not-so-rosy-anymore strip along the northern horizon. For the video cameras the dimming and rebrightening would actually be way more dramatic than to the human eye that compensates a lot: another interesting (and wholly unplanned) little discovery. From the hill vantage point it also seemed that all of the Shetlands were in the same cloudy situation - but that impression would soon turn out to be wrong! Already during the trip back to hour rented home in Gott near Lerwick, the clouds broke up and provided some views of the end of the 2nd partiality (with the 4th contact almost unimpeded).
And when we then watched a live transmission of the eclipse by BBC News 24 I had videotaped, we learned that at the other end of Mainland, in the far south at Sumburgh Head, some segments of the ring had been visible ever so briefly, though never the full ring. But preparing to leave the Shetlands later that day - a precious, remote world we had all grown pretty fond of by now! - we were still convinced that the full ring had never been seen from anywhere here. That is, until we met Holloway and Ainsworth again on the ferry back to Aberdeen. Could we now see the video from off Noss, please? No, the camera battery had run down, and the charger was in the checked baggage way down in the ship's bowels. But as »failure is not an option« in things space, a steward was eventually sent to retrieve the suitcase (setting off a car alarm on the way ...), and we finally got a close look at the potentially unique recording, after also commandeering one of the ferry's TV sets.
Our two teachers had been on one of the boats which are normally used for viewing the spectacular gannett colonies of Noss from the seaside, and it was from near that location that they had observed the eclipse. Sunrise had been seen there, too, through the same slit in the cloud deck we had enjoyed, and then all hope seemed to have been lost, as for us. But by sheer coincidence (or is it rather a subtle marine-meteorological effect?) the breaking up of the clouds had started here a bit earlier than in our North, and right around the 1½ minutes of annularity enough breaks had gathered in the right azimuth and elevation to permit a few glimpses at the ring the Sun had become. Sure, the view was still marred by numerous band of clouds even in the best moments - but there was definitely a ring there, far more convincing than what we had seen on the BBC transmission. Soon thereafter the view was lost again, but success was undeniable. And in a way, we now had become part of it, too, through the most unlikely chain of coincidences - the icing on the cake of a marvellous journey into a truly undiscovered country.
Daniel Fischer - first drafted on June 3, links added June 11, 2003.
Our expedition was mentioned not only in several Scottish TV reports but also, we hear, on the radio and e.g. in the Glasgow Herald - and it even made an impact in the Confluence pages .... Many more reports from this eclipse are provided in the 2nd article of the Cosmic Mirror # 255 - while this story here has been hailed by the Shetland News ("very readable"), Shetland Tourism ("excellent account"; some pictures from the teachers' boat are also shown) and Reisebüro Südstadt ("must read") ...