The 45 minutes after First Contact were quite interesting if a bit uneventful.  Mike managed to acquire the Sun only a few minutes after First Contact and started taking hand-held shots with his digital camera pointing through the eyepiece.  We ate some more of the picnic (at least, until my dad kicked sand into half of it!) and generally observed through our eclipse glasses and by projection as the Sun was slowly covered, the temperature dropped, and the light began to look increasingly odd, almost eerie.  It didn’t seem to me to get perceptibly darker until about 20 minutes before Second Contact.  In the run up to Totality, things moved increasingly fast: the temperature continued to drop off, the light started falling exponentially, and the anticipation and excitement grew.  The biggest surprise was the absence of any shadow on the SW horizon until perhaps 60-90 seconds before Totality (and even that was only just noticeable).  In the last 30 seconds the light really plummeted, there was just a thin sliver of the Sun left, people started cheering, there were some nice Bailey’s Beads, a Diamond Ring and then Second Contact we were in Totality!  The weather hadn’t really interfered: we’d made it!

 

The sky was orange (not red) all around the horizon and the general light level was surprisingly high. We had a superb view of the corona, only slightly impaired by the high cloud. The cloud did make it harder (but not impossible) to pick out Mercury and Mars (Venus had been visible for ~10 minutes before Second Contact).  Chris had been the first to spot both the inner planets.

 

Mike was enraptured by the view he was getting through his Meade - at one point I had a quick look through and the view was indeed fabulous: deep red prominences and interesting detail in the coronal structure.  We enjoyed about 3m45s of Totality, though it seemed more like less than half that.  All too soon it was coming to an end: the sky lightened to the SW and the redness of the chromosphere appeared on the SW limb of the Moon where the eclipse had started 1h20m earlier.  I warned everyone to get their eye protection ready and suddenly we saw a beautiful Diamond Ring: Third Contact!  It was far more dramatic than the Second Contact Diamond Ring, since our eyes had been dark adapting for over 3.5 minutes.

 

I picked up my camcorder+tripod, which had been filming the Sun for the past 1.5 hours, and swung it around to attempt to film the shadow departing from the Taurus mountains ~40-50km to the NE.  Although it was clear that there was a period when the mountains weren’t really visible and then a bit later they were again, there was no abrupt change as I’d hoped and expected.  The lack of shadow rush towards or away from us was probably in part due to the unusually bright Totality that we experienced (observers of previous “clear-sky” totalities, including Jamie, confirmed that this had indeed been a significantly brighter total eclipse); this in turn may have been due to the large quantity of very high altitude cloud that was above and around us scattering light from the penumbral region into the umbral cone (ie. it didn’t get as dark because the clouds were bouncing sunlight from outside the Zone of Totality into it!).

 

A lot of discussion about what we’d just witnessed, a bit more eating, and then a few group photos followed.  Most of the surrounding groups started packing up and leaving (probably because in their Teutonic haste to get the “best” spot, they hadn’t had the British foresight of preparing a picnic, ha!).  We were still on the dunes quite a while after the real end of the eclipse at Fourth Contact.  Mike had diligently continued to make observations and take shots after Totality - probably one of the very few people who bothered to do so.  Through his solar-filtered telescope it was possible to view some interesting mountain and crater features on the limb of the Moon.  Apart from that, it was all over.  For me it had been an unforgettably unique experience and made the whole trip thoroughly worthwhile.