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The August 1, 2008 total solar eclipse started in northern Canada,
cut across northern Greenland and the North Atlantic, then
continued through Siberia and Mongolia,
terminating in China.
<<--
NASA eclipse track diagram
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Primarily due to weather prediction considerations,
we elected to travel to the Gobi Desert in northern China
where the air was driest and most likely to be clear for the eclipse.
As it turned out, we viewed the eclipse successfully, but it was
an uncertain situation right down to the wire. The virtually
cloudless
wide angle view of the eclipse
[right] hides the
fact that our observing site had to be changed at the last
minute and we had heavy cloud cover for virtually all of our
3-week trip to Asia, which included Korea, China, and Mongolia.
Considering the short length of this eclipse as well as the
low angle of the eclipse (<15° above the horizon at totality)
with the associated risk of haze and cloud interference, I decided
to concentrate on rapid short exposure sequences at 2nd and 3rd
contacts and skip the long exposure sequences I did
for the 2006 eclipse
in Libya.
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