Part of the Trottier family voyaged to Hao Atoll in French Polynesia to view the total solar eclipse of July 11 2010: my brother Lorne, his wife Louise, their daughter Sylvie and her mate Eric, my brother Elliot and his wife Elisabeth, and of course Loula, Alexandre, and yours truly! A TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE!!! I edited the above movie from videos taken by Eric, of the family going berserk between second and third contacts, and by Lorne, of the view of the Sun during totality - with a runtime of 3:21, the video's duration is about the same as our totality ;). To view the video in higher resolution, click here for medium format, and click here for large format. The picture of totality on the right was taken by Alexandre! The resident astronomer on our eclipse voyage, Stephen Schneider, took an awesome image of shadow bands cast on the light cloud deck, which was featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day.

This fabulous family odyssey started when Loula, Alexandre, and I hosted Lorne and his gang at our Cabin in the Sky! We spent part of the evening of July 5 under clear skies in the observatory, where we looked through the big scope by eye at Messier 13 (the Great Globuar in the constellation of Hercules - an absolutely stunning sight!), Messier 57 (the Ring Nebula in Lyra), Messier 27 (the Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula), Messier 51 (the Whirlpool in Canes Venatici), and finally Messier 16 (the Eagle in Serpens - barely noticeable by eye through the big scope).

I asked my family to vote on the object they wanted to image (I gave them a list in advance of four objects to choose from), and the Eagle was the favourite by far. Sylvie told me that when she was a kid, she loved the picture of the Eagle that her Dad had on his wall. She thought that the "pillars of creation" looked like sea horses, and wondered how they could be so far out in space ;). The image below is about 30 minutes of total exposure in LRGB - the atmosphere was very turbulent that night, hence the stars are quite bloated. Click the Eagle image at the bottom of this page to pop-up the full resolution version. I'm going to give this beautiful object another try under better conditions!

It was so cool that this part of the sky, which at our latitude is almost lost at the horizon, was up near the zenith from our vantage point in the French Polynesian islands! I spent two hours one night flat on my back, on the deck of our beautiful bungalow over the sea at the Pearl Beach Resort on Bora Bora, staring dreamily by eye and through binoculars at the gorgeous southern Milky Way. Running far past Sagittarius and Scorpius (with its stinger overhead around 11PM, imagine that!), where from Canada it disappears into the drink at the horizon, this was a celestial treat beyond compare! I easily picked off a dozen Messier objects, most by eye, including Messier 7 (also known as Ptolemy's cluster), just off the scorpion's stinger, which I've never been able to see before, and which lies in the brightest knot of the Milky Way. I also had the luxury of viewing the small Magellanic cloud, by eye and through binoculars (not to mention alpha Centauri!). Comparing the Milky Way in Cygnus, which from here looks so fabulous, with the far richer southern Milky Way, made me better understand why so many deep-sky imagers hunger for time under southern skies.

CITSO Blog:

Night of the Eagle and

The Trottier Family Eclipse Expedition

Copyright © 2014 Howard Trottier