andrew_jorgensen

According to my eclipse bible (a heretical text on my tour, which pays its fealty to Mr. Eclipse himself), one of the first photographers to use Photoshop to build a composite photograph of the sun's corona took six months to come up with something he found satisfactory. I certainly didn't do better in a largely shadeless afternoon. I'll instead post ( four pictures. )

DATELINE - 80 KM SOUTH OF JALU, WESTERN DESERT, LIBYA

Libya Telecom & Technology has gone to great effort and has established, in the middle of the Sahara, 5 miles from the nearest highway and 50 miles from the nearest town, an internet cafe. In its tent on its tarp, it may be the most ephemeral of internet cafes, here today and gone the day after tomorrow, but it has free WiFi and it's not even all that slow. The population here has shot up from scorpions to perhaps five thousand, and the objective lenses must outnumber the people.

We'll have totality at 12:27 tomorrow, and the only possible weather problems are sand and dust storms. The skies were perfectly clear today at noon, so I'm hopeful. However, as an exercise in lowering expectations, the group leaders passed around a sheet of paper and asked everyone to count their total eclipses seen and their total eclipses attempted, and of the people in my row of the conference room, my mother and I were the only people with perfect records.

Libya has been quite a surprise. I was flabbergasted to find out that I could even enter the country: the rumor is that the US denied a visa to one of Ghaddafi's relatives and Libya has been reciprocating by denying entry to Americans. It was a tense hour while we waited for our tour company to sort out our immigration, but once that was done it was a breeze. In fact, no one has yet collected our visa fees. I can't really comment on the political situation as the tour guides have been politely circumspect (as opposed to Iran, where everyone we met was so quick to denounce the Ayatollahs that I was beginning to believe that that was what they were taught in the tour guide licensing course). However there are copious pictures of Colonel Ghaddafi. I think he's had a face lift.

Until now the tour has concentrated on Greco-Punic-Roman sites. Leptis Magna is certainly great in its size and in its preservation. Appolonia, pressed against the coast, has an elegaic moodiness. The sites have been so little exposed to Western tourism and its litter and footprints that there are no barriers and few rules at the site. I've scrabbled up capitals for better views, and at Cyrene getting around required walking on ancient Roman mosaics.

I am not sure how broad a band they've built out here to the Libyan desert, but I hope to have some pictures up tomorrow.

My mother was kind enough to dig out our Black Sea slides and scan in one of the photos I took of the 1999 total solar eclipse. It's a little fuzzy, as it was taken from a (large, albeit) boat and I'm not a very good photographer at the most relaxed of times; but I think it has some charm. It demonstrates the existence of the chromosphere and a few prominences, though it certainly does not demonstrate these with clarity.

I hope I have the opportunity to take a better photograph, but it's hard to practice at these things.