14 days to go

There will be a total solar eclipse visible in China July 22, 2009, 9-9:38 a.m. (Beijing time). I sincerely hope I can see this eclipse. I've been interested in solar eclipses for a while, ever since I read descriptions by writers Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard.

On June 30, 1927, Woolf recorded a long account of a solar eclipse in her diary. I found this section especially beautiful:
"I thought we were like very old people, in the birth of the world--druids of Stonehenge; ... at the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. These were still blue. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red and black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, and very beautiful, so delicately tinted. Nothing could be seen through the cloud. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue; and rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker and darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; and we thought now it is over--this is the shadow; when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead."

Woolf goes on to describe the return of light and notes that the next eclipse would not be until 1999. Annie Dillard writes about the 1999 eclipse as she viewed it on a mountain in eastern Washington in one of my favorite essays, "Total Eclipse."

Here is a passage I especially like from Dillard:
"I looked at Gary. He was in the film. Everything was lost. He was a platinum print, a dead artist's version of life. I saw on his skull the darkness of night mixed with the colors of day. My mind was going out; my eyes were receding the way galaxies recede to the rim of space. Gary was light-years away, gesturing inside a circle of darkness, down the wrong end of a telescope. He smiled as if he saw me; the stringy crinkles around his mouth moved. The sight of him, familiar and wrong, was something I was remembering from centuries hence, from the other side of death: yes, that is the way he used to look, when we were living. When it was our generation's turn to be alive."

According to scientist Wang Sichao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, "The total [July 2009] eclipse will last up to six minutes, or the longest one that can be seen in China in almost 500 years from 1814 to 2309" (China Daily, June 14, 2009 [http://www.chinadaily.com.cn//china/2009-06/14/content_8281854.htm]). Tour providers are advertising total solar eclipse tours on that site.

I wonder how early or late in the day the eclipse will be. China, a huge country, is all on one time zone. So what 9 a.m. means in Chengdu is not necessarily that time of day in terms of the sun as we know it. People do not necessarily work 8-5, since in the west it would still be dark for a couple hours in the morning. Weather could also be a factor with smog or thunderstorms. But regardless, I look forward to July 22, and I will record whatever I see.

Fun fact about China: The time in China is the same everywhere in the country, called "Beijing Time," even though China spans five time zones geographically--if I'm reading the map right. So China is longer east to west than the US with our four time zones. (LP 1008-1009)