Cosmic Cruising Catching the Ningaloo Eclipse from the High Seas

By Mary Hughes

I have always wanted to see a total eclipse, and well blow me down there we had it right here in Western Australia. 20th April 2023 will forever be etched in my mind. Wow! What an experience!

When I realised that an eclipse was going to happen in 2023, I looked around for an option to get to Exmouth and view it. That was challenging as the accommodation in Exmouth was already pretty much sold out. Exmouth is not a big town and has limited availability of accommodation anyway. I posed the question to the Perth Observatory Volunteers group and the ever-resourceful

Bevan Harris came up with a few suggestions one of which was a P&O cruise on the Pacific Explorer. That’s it I was sold! I organised the trip through Tropical Sails with a group and I was glad I did as we got good accommodation with group access to restaurants etc.

So we would be arriving in Exmouth Gulf on the morning of 20th April and viewing from the ship. This group of 55 people had all seen multiple eclipses over a period of years; one couple had seen 18 all over the world. The advantage that this gave us was knowledge of what to expect and how to view properly.

We were not disappointed, the atmosphere was amazing as the sky darkened, everything around us seemed to go still, and there was an eerie hush. We were told that totality phase is safe to view without the solar glasses we were using during the partial eclipse phase. By then, less than 0.001% of the Sun’s photosphere is visible. We took our glasses off for the expected Baily’s Beads and the Diamond Ring, and we saw it all!

There was a guy next to us who was filming the whole sequence and he had never quite got it right until this time. He had an email from his son telling him that his first grandchild had just been born and then he found his filming had worked. He was so overcome with it all, he was in tears. It was a totally amazing experience for us all.

Much as I would like to claim this picture, I cannot - but this is what I actually saw! The activity around the edges was bright and clear. I was told that I was very lucky for a first timer as not all totalities are so productive. Just to explain about the beads, they are an arc of bright spots seen during total and annular eclipses of the Sun. They are named for Francis Baily, an English astronomer, who called attention to them after seeing them during an annular eclipse on May 15th, 1836.

But apparently Sir Edmond Halley made the first recorded observations of Baily’s beads during the solar eclipse of May 1715. He described and correctly ascertained the cause of the effect in his “Observations of the late Total Eclipse of the Sun”.

I’m very tempted to go in 2028 so I’m staying in touch with the group who may be able to predict the best place to go, I hope. Somewhere from Kununurra to Sydney…go figure that out and perhaps I might see you there!