Eclipse day / Onboard ship

These photos show various activities onboard ship during the eclipse. Some other shots from shipboard are included here.

Actual pictures of the eclipse can be found at my Eclipse Page. Check them out.

A panorama onboard ship can be found on the Europe 2nd class panoramas page.

Don't forget to check out the eclipse sequence, which is a series of shots taken 20 seconds apart during the eclipse.

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Part of my panorama of the decks before the eclipse.

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The statue by the pool, with eclipse shades

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One great trick in an eclipse is to make a pinhole camera that projects the crescent sun. Here somebody has made the year out of pinholes. Everybody posed with it.

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Pre-eclipse, a shot of the top deck with heliport. Most people set up lower, it's more stable.

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From the aft deck, you see people preparing and relaxing. And you see the four other cruise ships that all came to our spot. I guess they liked us.

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Very few people set up on the forward deck, it seemed.

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Here we are posing with the eclipse. You can't really take a picture of a person and an eclipse, but I'm projecting the partially eclipsed sun onto a piece of plastic with my telescope, and we're being shot with it.

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Here we pose with my new portable telescope prior to the eclipse. We're on the aft deck.

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Another shot, from higher up, of the four ships, and the aft deck of the Marco Polo. We were set up in the middle, right near the rear.

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K. projects the 1999 pinholes onto her shirt.

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Kathryn loves to read, and though she didn't do too much of it on the cruise -- there was so much else to do -- I think this picture captures her very well.

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Joseph, our cabin steward. As on most cruise ships he's Phillipino. He works 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 10 straight months, then gets 2 months off. But in tips alone he makes 10 times what he would make back home, so he'll probably retire when he's 30.

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Our cabin on the Marco Polo. Not known for its large cabins, this was supposedly still one of the larger ones. The floor of all the main deck cabins sloped by a serious amount. It was hard to stand up on. The ship was a converted icebreaker and it had decks the ice would slough off of. It's main claim to fame is the Antarctic cruises, where it needs to be an icebreaker again.

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A lovely shot of the harbour pilot in Odessa jumping from the Polo onto the pilot boat so he can go home. Everybody's watching.