Antarctic Eclipse: Fans Pay Big to Be Left in Dark

John Roach
for National Geographic News

November 21, 2003

Penguin rookeries in Antarctica—weather permitting—will be audience to a total solar eclipse Sunday as the moon slips between Earth and the sun and casts a narrow band of the icy continent into daytime darkness.

A few hundred humans, too, hope to catch the celestial show. They've paid thousands of dollars to journey to—or over—Antarctica, the only landmass where the minutes-long event will be visible.

Some will watch from the deck of an icebreaker, others will stand on the edge of an icy airstrip, and two different groups will peer out the windows of chartered airplanes.

Many of these people are self-described eclipse chasers who stop at almost nothing to see the magic of a total solar eclipse, not even if it literally means traveling to the end of the Earth.

"Eclipses are just spectacular things to see," said Jay Pasachoff, a solar eclipse expert at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, who will watch this eclipse—his 37th—from the seat of an airplane.

The 310-mile (500-kilometer) wide path of totality begins its short sweep across Earth at 22:19 UT (5:19 p.m. ET) on Sunday in the southern Indian Ocean about 680 miles (1,100 kilometers) southeast of Kerguelen Island, according to NASA.

The shadow reaches the west coast of Antarctica at 22:35 UT and moves southeast across the interior to Queen Maud Land on the southern coast, where it leaves Earth's surface at 23:19 UT. The greatest time of totality occurs in Wilkes Land at 22:49 UT and lasts for 1 minute and 55 seconds.

Pasachoff and the other passengers on one of the two chartered flights that plan to intersect the eclipse will get about a 30-second extension in the time of totality owing to the speed of the aircraft.

Jen Winter, co-owner of Astronomical Tours in Kansas City, Missouri, which helped organize the icebreaker journey and an Antarctica land tour said eclipse-chasing is like "seeing the world on a deadline," taking its practitioners to regions they might otherwise never see.

"Ultimately, the allure of the inspirational experience of those few precious seconds of totality are enough to keep travelers asking 'when's the next one?'" she said.

Icebreaker and Land Views

About 100 people hope to see the eclipse from aboard the Kaptain Klebnikov, a Russian icebreaker converted for tourist use in 1992. The ship left from South Africa on November 5 and will arrive in Tasmania on December 3.

Quark Expeditions, a Darien, Connecticut-based company, regularly runs ship-based tours of Antarctica via the Kaptain Klebnikov. After requests from Winter's company, Astronomical Tours, Quark Expeditions modified their itinerary to intersect with the eclipse.

Along the way passengers will visit the sub-Antarctic islands rich in wildlife and spend several days exploring the Antarctic continent via helicopter and Zodiac. Prices ranged from U.S. $18,995 per person for triple occupancy berths to $35,995 for a corner suite.

"There are passengers who are taking the voyage for the tour first and eclipse as a bonus, while others are taking the voyage to see the eclipse with the rest of the tour as a bonus," said Winter. "The cross-section of travelers is very diverse."

Astronomical Tours also arranged a land tour to Antarctica at a price of $13,490 per person, which includes a three-day tour of Cape Town, South Africa, before taking a six-hour flight to the Russian base of Novolazarevskaya in Antarctica, where the tour company has scouted out an eclipse viewing site.

The eclipse takes place at the beginning of the Antarctic summer, but owing to potential cloud cover, chances of successfully viewing the spectacle from the ground are 44 to 55 percent at the airstrip and approximately 37 percent from aboard the ship.

Flightseeing

For an almost guaranteed view of the eclipse, some enthusiasts have opted to watch the event from the windows of one of two specially chartered airplanes at about 38,000 feet (11,500 meters) above the ice.

"I had an upgrade from an $18,000 berth in a triple to a $24,000 berth in a double [on the icebreaker] but decided when the airplane became available it was the better way to do it," said Pasachoff, the Williams College-based astronomer.

Pasachoff will fly aboard a Qantas Boeing 747-400 from Melbourne, Australia, on a 14-hour nonstop trip. The eclipse intersect is an add-on to a regularly-scheduled Antarctica "flightseeing" tour with Australia-based Croydon Travel. Eclipse enthusiasts are paying a premium for window seats on the eclipse side of the aircraft.

In collaboration with Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory in Tucson, Pasachoff will attempt to image the eclipse electronically with equipment mounted on a gyro platform for stability.

"We hope to get a high-quality image of the sun to put together with spacecraft images to a get a more complete view of the sun that is better than what is available from either alone," he said.

The image will be of use to astronomers for ongoing research into the origin of the solar corona and how the solar wind begins to propagate out towards Earth, said Pasachoff.

A second eclipse flight arranged by Prescott, Arizona-based TravelQuest International and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Sky & Telescope magazine, will depart from Punta Arenas, Chile aboard a Lan Chile Airbus 340.

"This is a 260-passenger aircraft, yet less than 70 people will be aboard, the simple reason being you can only see the eclipse from one side of the aircraft," said Aram Kaprielian, president of TravelQuest International.

Prices for window seats on the eclipse flights start at $4,330 for an economy class seat on the flight originating from Australia to $25,000 for a first-class seat on the flight originating from Chile.

Kaprielian said that while passengers aboard the Lan Chile flight will be permitted to make pictures of the event, the editors of Sky & Telescope will capture both still and video images of the entire event that will be shared with all flight passengers.

"We are telling people that this can be a visual experience and we encourage these people to experience it as such," he said.

The University of Arizona's Schneider, who defined and developed the technical, operational, and planning aspects of both eclipse flights, said that seeing the solar corona during an eclipse is truly unlike any other in the human experience.

"But be forewarned, corona is the fourth 'c' and more addictive than coffee, caffeine, or cocaine," he said. "If you have seen one total solar eclipse, you have to see them all."

Jay M. Pasachoff, of the department of astronomy at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has received a number of grants from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration to study the sun, particularly during a solar eclipse. His most recent project supported by the Society was in 2001, when he observed the total solar eclipse from Zambia. You can read about this project here: Total Eclipse May Help Solve Mystery of Sun's "Halo"