The Last Total Solar Eclipse of the Millennium:
Turkey 1999
The "last total solar eclipse of the millennium" (no dispute there;
there are none in the year 2000) had the potential to be seen by
millions without even leaving their homes, as it swept across
Europe and then into Asia. Looking at a
chart of the probability of clear skies along the eclipse track
indicated that the chances
of seeing the eclipse increased the further east that one went,
with the maximum probability exceeding 90% in Iran. In the end,
I decided that Turkey offered the best compromise of interesting
culture, length of totality, and chances of clear skies. Luckily,
Dave Moser,
the organiser of our successful trips to Baja in 1991
and the Caribbean in 1998, had reached the same conclusion, and
made connections with Meli Tour,
a Turkish tour agency operated
by Mehlika Seval, to lead a group of 27 of us on a 13 day tour
that would take in most of the highlights of western Turkey, as
well as get us to the centerline for the eclipse on August 11.
Despite swearing that he would never go on another eclipse trip
again, Mervyn eventually decided that the delights of Turkey
were just too tempting, and so we were once again reunited for
my 5th eclipse expedition (his 10th).
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, comments,
or experiences of your own to share about the 1999 eclipse. My e-mail
address is "sdr", followed by "@aaoepp.aao.gov.au" (sorry, that's
a kludge to confuse those Web-crawlers that trawl the WWW for addresses
to add to junk-mail lists).
To speed up downloading, I have shrunk the images by a factor of 2,
and broken the trip up into sections. If you wish to see the full-size
version of any picture, just click on it. The images started out as 35 mm
slides, were scanned onto PhotoCD by
Imagers
of Atlanta GA, then touched up and converted to JPEG format using
Adobe Photoshop.
As you well know, a large part of western Turkey was devastated
by a major earthquake on August 17, 1999 (and again just three months
later). I would urge all of you
reading this to please help the Turks rebuild their shattered lives
and communities by donating to the
American
Red Cross International Disaster Relief Fund. Tesekkür
Ederim.
Other accounts of the 1999 August 11 total solar eclipse:
Return to Stuart's home page.
Return to Stuart's eclipse page.
Last modified: May 20, 2000.
Stuart Ryder