We dragged ourselves out of bed at the appointed ungodly hour, and trooped out to the buses for the ride to the eclipse site. Apparently our hotel was the meeting point for the entire Explorers eclipse expedition (they had several different tours going, ours being the cheapest - I imagine the people on the longer tours got the better hotels :-) so before too long there were tons of tour buses in the parking lot and much logistication going on. We didn't end up getting underway until well after 7:00 (so they could have let us sleep in a little, eh?).

Dawn of eclipse day

The beginning of the bus ride was our first real look at Kapadokya. The geology of the area is largely volcanic (more on that in the next part), and this combined with the warm dry climate makes it good for growing grapes. There were vineyards all over the place - it's the big winemaking region of Turkey (yep, a country with a 99% Muslim population has a big winemaking region - hey, I never said they were all *strict* Muslims).

Passed through Kayseri on the way out, and got a look at the big volcano nearby. It's over 9000 feet high, and, unbelievably, given the hot weather, still had snow on the top. The area has quite a ski business in winter. Eventually the vineyards started giving way to other agriculture - lots of fields of wheat and sugar beets. That, combined with the topography of wide plains and mountains in the distance, reminded me strongly of southern Montana, where my father grew up (on a sugar beet farm). The highway we traveled follows the same route as the old Silk Road - hey, if it's been a good route for thousands of years, why change it? We passed by Sivas, the big city in that part of Turkey, and headed out a little way past. The site itself was out in the middle of what looked like someone's sheep ranch - on a broad flat high plain, with the little village of Gündun about a kilometer away.

The village of Gündun as seen from our eclipse viewing site; Setting up to see the eclipse

The tour group thought of everything, apparently - the site came equipped with a porto-WC and a small squad of military guards (in case terrorists decided to attack the hordes of tourists, I guess). Turkish army dudes wear green fatigues with natty little blue berets. They mostly stood around fingering their rifles and looking very bored.

By this time it was nearly noon, and quite hot out in the sun (no shade at all at the site - several people had had the foresight to bring umbrellas along, and were hiding out under them). There were thunderclouds building ominously to the north and southeast, and I began to worry that they'd head our way.

A little after 1:00 - first contact! The beginning of the eclipse, and the moon's shadow took its first little bite out of the sun. The cosmic dance was really happening. Almost as soon as the eclipse started, it began to cool off; and without the afternoon heating to drive them, the thunderclouds stopped growing as well.

A number of people from the village had come out to join the crazy tourists watching the eclipse. A trio of young girls hung around with us for awhile - we gave them some viewers to watch the eclipse, and tried to talk with them (which mostly consisted of us trying to ask them simple questions in Turkish and them laughing at how badly we spoke it).

An hour or so went by, and the effects of the eclipse were more noticeable - it was much cooler, and the light was starting to dim. Everyone was starting to get the eclipse jitters - something deep in your lizard brain starts telling you that SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT - THE SUN IS GOING OUT! It always makes me want to start pounding on drums to frighten away the moon dragon eating the sun (thankfully for my companions, I didn't have any percussion instruments nearby). Soon the sun was only a small crescent, like the Turkish flag:

The last ten minutes or so before totality have the most changes - soon it got very dark, and Venus became visible (strangely, in this eclipse that was the only planet we saw, though it seemed darker than the 1991 eclipse in Mexico where we saw four planets). People were getting noticeably agitated, and a number of the village folks left to go back home (perhaps the more devout ones? I heard that in Iran many superstitious Muslims wouldn't go out to see the eclipse, saying it was bad juju (or whatever the Muslim equivalent of bad juju is)).

Finally there was just a tiny sliver of sun left, and that dissolved into Bailey's beads and suddenly filters went flying everywhere as totality began. People started whooping, yelling, or just babbling incoherently. There is absolutely nothing like a total solar eclipse - seeing that huge black disk where the sun used to be is just completely mind-blowing. It was dark enough that I couldn't read the settings on my camera.

I spent a little time looking around at the 360-degree sunset.

There was a lot of solar activity this year, so the corona was quite large and bright, and you could even see some red prominences with the naked eye.

The one bummer about this from a photography point of view is that none of my pictures turned out at all (the sun image was just too tiny), and Bonnie's really didn't work well either (she couldn't keep the 300mm zoom steady enough). Thankfully Castor got some good shots of the eclipse on video. One of those, showing the prominences quite clearly, is the large image on the start page of my story.

All too soon (2.5 minutes later) it was over, and the sun reappeared with a spectacular diamond ring effect, and over the next 90 minutes the sun won its battle with the moon dragon and gradually reasserted itself.

For some strange reason the tour buses were scheduled to leave before fourth contact (the end of the eclipse), though they promised one bus would stay behind for those who wanted to experience the whole thing. (why they couldn't just wait another 40 minutes I don't know) We elected to stay, as did a dozen or so others. When it was over we packed up our stuff, waved goodbye to our village girl buddies, and headed into the bus for the drive back to Avanos. It turns out that most of the rest of those who stayed to the end were serious eclipse nerds, and they proceeded to talk exposures, video settings, scope clock drive programs, and other such minutiae the ENtire four hour ride back. Oy vey!

The actual sunset on eclipse day - as taken from the bus

Once back at the hotel, we ate dinner and hung around for a while, waiting for late evening for astronomical event number 2, the Perseid meteor shower. Our hotel was on the outskirts of Avanos (not a very big town), so the skies were plenty dark right outside. We walked down the dirt road next to the hotel for a bit, took what looked like a little-used branch of said dirt road for a little longer, and lay down in the road to do some meteor-watching. We saw several nice big ones, though the frequency was not too high (the last few years of Perseids have been very light, for some reason; maybe the comet's running out of dust or something). We lay out there for an hour or so, watching meteors, chatting and half dozing, when suddenly we heard car sounds in the immediate vicinity. Leaping up and yelling like banshees, we got our butts out of the road pronto, in time to watch a car drive by on the nearby larger road (luckily not the one where we'd been lying). Guess those roads weren't as little-used as we thought. Feeling like absolute idiots (which, of course, we were :-) we walked back to the hotel and went to bed. What a day...

On to adventures in Kapadokya