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Today was an exciting day in McMurdo. A total solar eclipse occured over Antarctica. Of course the path of the totality did not pass over us here in McMurdo. We got to see 75% of the sun get covered up by the moon. People at South Pole Station saw 90% of the sun covered, and somewhere in West Antarctica the sun was completely blacked out, but there were very few people around to see it. In honor of the occaision we trudged up Ob-Hill to get a better view with our little strips of cut up x-ray film to protect our eyes from the sun's burning rays. As we climbed up the hill the sun started to slowly get smaller and more crescent shaped until we reached the top and we got about 5 minutes of the maximum eclipse.
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| Picture taken through a strip of x-ray film during the eclipse. | Same picture taken through a set of polarizing filters. |
There was no great diminution of sunlight during the event. It appeared to be a few hours later in the afternoon while the eclipse was occurring, and afterwards some clouds moved in so it didn’t get brighter again.
Another cool thing that happened today was that we got the results from our initial time-lapse camera deployment processed and compressed into a movie. The film clip below shows what happens in 72 hours on the bottom at our Cinder Cones site. The squares are Tupperware tubs filled with sediment that has either been enriched with sediment, covered with Beggiatoa bacterial mat, both enriched and covered, or neither enriched nor covered. Can you guess which treatment the sea-stars are gravitating to? Each second in the clip corresponds to about an hour of real time, so you get some idea of how fast the sea-stars and ribbon-like nemertean worms are moving.
Click here for a 1.5 mb timelapse movie (quicktime)