Brewers decide to go for it. John, Robert, Ellen, and Bill rendezvous on the Big Island at the Hyatt Waikoloa with several hundred extremely eager amateur astronomers who have signed up to see the Big One with Scientific Expeditions. Technical lectures on astronomy each night. Tension builds, like the days before a Super Bowl game. The night before The Big Event the weatherman says an extraordinary inversion is occurring.
Amateur astronomers spend all night selecting special locations for their telescopes.
The shadows of the leaves make beautiful shifting circular patterns on the ground. This time we joined up with a group from the Adler Planetarium for an eclipse cruise on the Stella Solaris. In the days before the eclipse we visited Istanbul and then went clockwise around the Black Sea stopping at Nessebur, Bulgaria, Odessa, Ukraine, and Yalta, Ukraine. On the morning of August 11, the day of the eclipse, we were quite pleased when we woke up and looked out the window to see bright sunlight and a very calm sea. All day long the tension built with the geeks setting up their telescopes.