The Day Before
The Total Eclipse of the sun on 4th December, 2002 was visible for only a short time in Australia. The vast majority went to Ceduna on the coast, and almost saw nothing due to cloud! The next most popular place was Lyndhurst, in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, where a hippie party apparently ensued ;-)
The smart people (sic) went to "the Corner". This is the intersection of Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia. About 150 people descended on the only building at Cameron Corner, appropriately known as the Corner Store, where the normal population is less than 10. Cameron Corner is about 1500 km from Brisbane via St George, Thargomindah and the Noccundra Hotel. The last 280 km is dirt and the photo above shows our trusty steed at the Omicron turnoff. At this point there is 100 km of dirt road still to go - most of it in a worse state than what you see above.
And yes, you are correct - the number plate is ELP 01 - for reasons which are obvious if you explore the rest of this web site!
We arrived at the Corner the day before. As you can see from the photo above, there was thick cloud everywhere which did not clear up until midday on Eclipse Day - phew!
Eclipse Day
We spent most of the day wandering around looking at specimen sites. Eventually, we decided upon a 10 metre high dune, exactly on centre line, which was about 20 km from Cameron Corner - about 3 km from Fort Grey camp site in the middle of the Sturt National Park.
 | Totality was at about 7.11 pm (Queensland Time ie GMT
+ 10) although the eclipse itself started about 1 hour
before. As you can see, taking photos with an ordinary
camera was a waste of time! This shot was taken about 5
minutes after the eclipse had started. With about an hour to go, the sun was very close to the horizon. At totality, the sun was 1 degree above the horizon! Thus, very little was seen of the partial eclipse after totality as the sun set about 10 minutes later. Of course, this did provide some spectacular photos. |
 | This shot was taken on a Minolta with the Mylar filter held over the lens. The photo was taken about 2 minutes after the one above. See image below for more details on the filter. |
 | This shot was taken on a Sony Mini DV camcorder zoomed in at 10x optical zoom. The only way to get any decent photos at this resolution was to hold a Mylar film in front of the camera lens. We had purchased some "Eclipse 2002" sun glasses, which are practically black, and these made a perfect filter for the camcorder ;-) |
 | This shot was taken about 3 minutes after totality, using the Mylar filter as described above. |
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