Moai at Ahu Tahai gaze thoughtfully up at star trails the night after the eclipse.
Credit: Dan Falk
OCEAN, CLOUDS. OCEAN, clouds. That's all you can see from the aeroplane window on the five-hour flight from Santiago, Chile, to Easter Island.
Even the electronic map displayed on the in-flight TV screen offers little in the way of perspective; for most of the journey, it simply shows the tiny aircraft icon against an unchanging blue backdrop.
And so, on reaching the island - Isla de Pascua in Spanish, Rapa Nui to the native Polynesian population - one truly feels that he has reached the end of the Earth.
Easter Island, with its fascinating history and enigmatic stone statues, would be a compelling destination at any time - but my trip in July 2010 had a special significance: this tiny, remote island was one of just a handful of places on Earth where it would be possible to view the total solar eclipse of July 11.
For some, eclipse-chasing is the ultimate hobby, a subtle blend of art, science and travel. Die hard 'umbraphiles' - named for the darkest part of the Moon's shadow - will spare no expense to see as many total eclipses as they can.
Others, such as myself, wish they could see every eclipse, but, limited by constraints of time and money, have to pick and choose carefully.
Some eclipse chasers are professional astronomers, but many are simply enthusiastic amateurs and photographers; people for whom the drama of a solar eclipse is nature's ultimate spectacle, a sight not to be missed - assuming you can find a way of getting there.
THE MOON PASSES roughly between the Sun and the Earth once a month, at a new Moon; but because the Moon's orbit is inclined by a few degrees compared to the Earth's orbit around the Sun, we usually don't get an eclipse. The way the geometry works out, we only get a perfect alignment about once every 18 months.
Moreover, a solar eclipse is only visible from a small area of the Earth's surface, where the Moon's long, cone-shaped shadow strikes our planet. As the Earth turns, the shadow traces out a long, narrow path, known as the 'path of totality'.
Of course, not all eclipses are equal. Totality can last anywhere from mere seconds to a maximum of just over seven and a half minutes. My first total eclipse, which I viewed from the Baja California peninsula in Mexico in 1991, was one of the longest of the 20th century, lasting just under seven minutes. By comparison, the Easter Island eclipse was to last about four minutes and 45 seconds - not a record-breaker, but more than respectable.
I waited the better part of a decade for my next eclipse, which I saw from the island of Curaçao, in the Caribbean, in 1998; a year later I was in Salzburg, Austria for the 1999 eclipse. And then there came another decade of waiting - but already my thoughts were focussed on 11 July 2010. NASA's eclipse map showed the path of totality: a long, gentle curve, starting in the western Pacific Ocean, slicing through French Polynesia, running smack dab across Easter Island, and then on to the very southern tip of South America.
My plan began to take shape when I ran into astronomer Jay Pasachoff of Williams College in Massachusetts, USA. He's a veteran eclipse chaser, with nearly 30 total solar eclipses under his belt. For Pasachoff and his students, an eclipse provides a unique opportunity to study the solar corona - the Sun's hot outer atmosphere - during the brief minutes of totality. Pasachoff put me in touch with a California-based tour operator, A Classic Tours Collection, and their CEO and head eclipse-trip planner, Mark Sood. A few weeks later - and, I confess, with a much less robust bank account - I had my itinerary for Easter Island.
