Eclipse Australia Port Douglas 2012

Total Solar Eclipse

 14 November 2012

Port Douglas

Far North Queensland

Australia 

Eclipse travelling can be frustrating.  I have heard somewhere, that if you stay in the one location, a total solar eclipse will happen once every 400 years.  So, if you really want to see one, you will most probably have to travel to see one.  You, and lots of other people.  So organising a trip to a location lucky enough to have a solar eclipse has a little more aggravation than a regular trip will entail.  Hotels will raise their prices for the occasion, everything else becomes more expensive, as locations cash in, and at the end of the day, the entire event can be utterly ruined by the weather.

This happened for my first Solar Eclipse trip to Tanegashima, Japan on the 22nd of July 2009.  This was the 'Eclipse of the Century' with 6 minutes of totality.  I was living in Japan at the time, in Tokyo, and the effort involved in organising a trip there, and back (which had to be organised separately), was arduous enough to earn me a brief interview on Bloomberg News at the time.  And, for all that, on the day, it was completely overcast and raining.

On the morning of the 14th of November, on 4 mile beach, Port Douglas, for the morning of the eclipse, it was cloudy all along the horizon.  There were breaks in the clouds, but it looked as if a large band of cloud was going to obscure the eclipse, and I was resigned to having travelled only to miss another eclipse. 

And then, there was a miracle break in the clouds for exactly 2 minutes, for the 2 minutes of totality.  It was a beautiful sight to behold, an impossible object hanging in the sky with weird light.  Words fail, and pictures, honestly, do no justice.  But I tried.

The following shots are of the same eclipse, but I played with the colour balance of each for effect, with the exception of the first shot, which is an unaltered crop.

Port Douglas is gateway to the Daintree Forest, one of the oldest rainforest in the world.  It would have been rude not to visit...

World Heritage Mossman Gorge is nestled in the Daintree Forest

Cape Tribulation is about as far north as you can travel along the coast without a 4WD

Along the Captain Cook Highway, coming into Cairns...

And a day out on Agincourt Reef, on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef was also on the cards.  Agincourt Reef is on the edge of the Continental Shelf, where you can see the reef drop off into the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

 My images do not belong to the Public Domain. All images in this portfolio are owned and © copyrighted by Peter Pascoe. Any reproduction, modification, publication, transmission, transfer, or exploitation of any of the content, for personal or commercial use, whether in whole or in part, without written permission from myself is prohibited by law. All rights reserved.