The last Solar Eclipse in Mongolia was on March 9, 1997. Here is my account of that momentous event:
I will admit that the line about the total eclipse of the sun from the Carly Simon song was running through my head as our Mongolian Airlines 737 landed in Ulaan Baatar, the capital of Mongolia. The center line of the total solar eclipse scheduled for March 9 was passing near the city of Darkhan 136 miles north of Ulaan Baatar and I planned to be there.
Exactly sixty-seven hours and ten minutes earlier I had left Anchorage on Korean Airlines, and after a three hour layover in Seoul had continued on to Beijing. At one o'clock in the afternoon in Beijing several thousand people were still amassed in Tianamen Square, many still holding pictures of Deng Xiaoping, whose funeral service before a crowd of 10,000 in the Great Hall of the People had ended only two hours before. In my outrageously expensive hotel room I tuned in CNN International and listened to several pundits in Hong Kong ponder the future of China. They cautiously predicted a smooth transition of power but agreed outsiders know little more about the hermetic councils of the Chinese Communist Party than they do about the inner courts of the Qing and Ming. No one could say what conflicts might be brewing in the world’s most populous nation. This brought to mind, not Carly Simon, but John Milton and his lines from “Paradise Lost”:
As when the sun, newly risen,
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams . . .
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.
At least from the time of the Babylonians 4000 years ago eclipses, comets, and other celestial phenomena have been considered portents of the death of kings, political and social upheavals, and all manner of other man-made and natural catastrophes and disasters. We were in for a double dip on March 9; for the first time since 1948 a comet would be visible to the naked eye during the totality of the eclipse. This was the comet Hale-Bopp, which some astrologers were calling the “Comet of the Century”, and which had already whipped up a firestorm of controversy in its own right.
Cataclysms aside, the eclipse promised to be the biggest tourist event in Mongolia since the arrival of the Polo Brothers. The cab driver on the eleven mile run into town told me that city officials had first anticipated 8,000 to 10,000 eclipse gazers from all over the world, but had recently down scaled the estimate to 2500, still a lot for a country which hosted a total of 4000 American tourists in all of 1996.
Celebrities were expected. In February the Mongolian newspaper Tol breathlessly reported: ”Madonna, a renowned pop singer from the United States, will visit Mongolia in March to watch the solar eclipse. Madonna learned about Mongolia from Hollywood star Richard Gere who came here last August accompanying Dalai Lama. An emissary of Madonna came recently to study the local travel and accommodation conditions. It is expected that Madonna will arrive on her private plane on March 8 and stay overnight. It's still unclear whether Madonna will bring along her newborn.”
Shortly afterwards a rumor washed over Ulaan Baatar that Bill Gates would be in town for the eclipse. No one in authority could confirm or deny these reports; perhaps they were just variants of Elvis sightings, a form of low level hysteria brought about by uncritical exposure to the American celebrity-making media machine. Still, interest in the eclipse among even the hoi polloi of America was feverish. Montana-based horse wrangler and international gadabout Kent Madin, who in recent years had become a magnate in Mongolian tourism, told me before I left that he had over ninety clients signed up—he could have got more but he couldn't guarantee them hotel room—and that his group plus staff would almost fill one of the six special Mongolian Airlines flights from Beijing to Ulaan Baatar scheduled for the two days before the eclipse.
With the help of my cab driver I was soon ensconsced in a $6 a night dump just up the street the palatial Chinggis Khaan Hotel, where rooms started at over a eighty dollars a night. Every reputable hotel in town was of course booked to the rafters for the week straddling the eclipse and my driver friend warned me that even this place would fill up in a couple of days. To make sure I wasn't left out in the cold—not a figure a speech here; it was –10°F my first morning in town—I paid for two weeks in advance. My quarters, while humble, were certainly roomy. The hotel was an old apartment building and for my six bucks a night I got a whole apartment—big living room, two bedrooms, kitchen, and bath. If you have ever been in cheesier examples of Khrushchev-era Soviet apartments you get the idea.
On the sun-drenched morning of February 26 the flanks of Bogd Кhan Uul, the mountain massif that looms above the southern edge of the city, are glistening with fresh-fallen snow as I walk down the street to the Chinggis Khaan, a new ten-story 182 room hotel of Xanaduian proportions and design. On the monumental steps leading to the entrance four Mongolian men are brooming off fresh snow. The huge lobby is deserted except for one young women at the reception desk. The fifth floor dining room, with a spectacular view of the Bogd Khan Uul through a wall of glass, is a sea of gleaming white table cloths. Only two tables are occupied. “You will have eggs,” the waitress informs me. Two eggs over-easy, toast, jam, and instant coffee cost $5.00. The waitress says a total of forty people are staying in the huge hotel, mostly businessmen and their paramours.
In the afternoon I walk downtown and circle expansive Sukhe Baatar Square, with its statue of Sukhe Baatar, the communist hero of the Mongolian Revolution, mounted on a rearing stead. A quick check in the Museum of Natural History, where the dinosaur exhibitions are a sure-fire magnet for tourists, and several other museums, followed by dinner at the Bayangol Hotel and a troll through several watering holes supposedly favored by foreigners confirms that no more than a handful of the expected horde of eclipsers have yet invaded.
By March 1 I detect a gabble of languages ringing through the stairwells of my hovel: American and British English, German, French, Japanese, and assorted unknowns. This is the student-aged economy-class crowd. The main topic of conversation among the young men is where to buy beer and score chicks. A few days later a big group of incredibly boisterous Singapore Chinese arrive. They take over the canteen on the floor below and not until after four in the morning does their singing and shouting die down.
Unable to sleep I bundle up and go out to the large school yard just behind the hotel. Since my arrival in Ulaan Baatar I had been trying without success to see the Comet Hale-Bopp. Either I had passed out from exhaustion in the wee hours or the skies had been overcast. Now as I rounded the corner of the hotel and looked up I instantly spotted the comet hanging high in the east-north-east sky.
Even comets with great potential have been known to fizzle out and disappoint earth-bound viewers, but if Hale-Bopp lived up to its early billing it was shaping up as the brightest visitor to pass inside the Earth's orbit since the great comet reported by Tycho Brahe in 1577. And if all went according to plan it would become visible to the naked eye during the March 9 eclipse's period of totality. This happening last on November 1 1948 during an eclipse in Kenya, and before that on May 17 1882, when a comet was observed during totality of an eclipse in Egypt. Hale-Bopp would approach to within 196 million kilometers of Earth on March 22 before zooming off into the cosmos, but already during the first week of March I could easily detect its notorious twin-pronged tail which had helped spawn the Hale-Bopp companion imbroglio.
The fuss started when Chuck Shramek, an amateur astronomer in Houston, Texas, took a photograph which apparently showed a strange Saturn-like object following in the comet's wake. He posted the photo on the Internet and announced his findings on the late-night radio talk show "Coast to Coast AM", hosted by Art Bell, a tireless promoter of a doomsday scenario he calls The Quickening. Immediately the Internet was throbbing with speculation: the object was a alien space craft which was closely following Hale-Bopp and leaving its own tail; it was causing Hale-Bopp to change course; it was emitting radio signals; the government had Hubble Space Telescope photos of the companion and was sand-bagging; and on and on. Professional astronomers quickly retorted on-line and elsewhere that Shramek had gears loose in his gyro and that the “unknown” object was actually a mundane star designated SAO 141894 on celestial maps.
The Hale-Bopp companion caper took an even more bizarre turn when one Courtney Brown, a proponent of “scientific remote viewing” —New Age jargon for clairvoyance—announced on the Art Bell show that his remote viewers had detected in the comet’s wake a larger-than-earth hollow sphere apparently controlled by a superior intelligence and filled with billions of aliens whose intentions toward Earth were probably not all that benign. The sphere was sending out radio signals and of course there was a government cover-up.
Then "Major" Ed Dames, also a remote viewing tout who claims to have worked for sundry U.S. intelligence agencies, appeared on the Art Bell Show and dismissed Brown's claims as pure hooey. He went on—apparently with a straight face; it's hard to tell on radio—to propound his own theory: certain cosmic intelligences, knowing that Hale-Bopp was going to pass relatively close to Earth, had attached to it a cylindrical object programmed to spew out a pathogen which would destroy almost all the planet's vegetation. Why, you might ask? It seems these cosmic intelligences view human beings as little more than a bad case of acne on the face of the Earth and that by administering an antibiotic—in this case a plant pathogen which will destroy human food sources—the Earth will be cured. Why not a pathogen that destroys human beings directly? Don't ask. Anyhow, the pathogen will fall on Africa first in 1998 and then spread wildly over the planet. Only 20% of the human population will survive the final cut. Thoroughly chastised, the survivors will presumably abstain from fossil fuels, spray deodorants, and non-returnable beer cans.
For weeks these and other doomsday scenarios roiled on the Internet and insomniac talk shows and finally even slithered into the mainstream media, including the San Diego Mercury News, MSNBC, and even the Washington Post, whose reporter portentously labeled the whole mess a “splintering of a consensual reality” by “the radio-cyberspace paradigm factory.”
Mongolians, blithely unaware of the comet companion brouhaha, have their own fish to fry; namely, how to extract as much money as possible from the whole eclipse-comet configuration. Not content with the money dumped into airlines, hotels, restaurants, gift shops, brothels, and other service industries, the Eclipse Planning Committee has levied a $10 fee on foreigners entering the "eclipse zone"—Mongolians pay 2000 tögrögs, $2.50. For this you get an eclipse badge which you are required to wear while in Darkhan. Plus there is a tariff for all vehicles entering the eclipse zone—$15.00 for those carrying foreigners and 5,000 tg for those carrying locals. Most eye-popping is a $25,000 to $40,000 fee for taking video or motion picture film of the eclipse—it's unclear whether this applies only to outfits like CNN and big-time documentary makers or also to Ma and Pa Kettle with a mini-cam. Then if you are really worried about the weather you can fly above any potential eclipse-blocking cloud cover in a Mongolian Airlines 737—$2,500 for a thirty minute flight straddled around totality—and if you don't want to rub noses with the rabble on the 737 you can charter your own Russian AN - 24 airplane for $800 an hour.
In Ulaan Baatar a welter of activities were laid on to lure in eclipsers on their way to and from Darkhan. Predictably the mainstays of the city's performing arts—the Theater of Opera and Ballet, the State Drama Theater, the Ensemble of National Song and Dance, and the State Circus—all planned special performances. But the most over-the-top event was the "Great Khaan's Dinner Show" to be held at the Chinggis Khaan Hotel. While consuming a four-course Great Khaan Meal" complete with the "Great Khaan's favorite vodka," diners were to be entertained with selections by a violin ensemble and a folk song and dance group; a set by Saraa, Mongolia's reigning "Queen of Pop Music"; a fashion show by Soyolmaa, Mongolia's leading fashion designer, featuring Mongolia's top models (namely Ariunaa, Zulaa, Undraa, Boloroo, Tuya, and Oyanaa); a demonstration by Khongorzul, Mongolia's top female contortionist, a cameo appearance by "Mr. Mongolia"; and last but hardly least, a pack of performing wolves directed by famed—in Mongolia—animal trainer Amgalan. All this cost a mere $70 per person. What led the producers of this extravaganza to conclude that visitors, especially the type likely to be attracted to something as arcane as an eclipse, would willingly shell out a seventy bucks for a dinner show, even one featuring trained wolves and a contortionist, is unclear.
Not everyone regarded the eclipse as a cash cow to be milked. The Buddhist community in particular was less than sanguine. According to Buddhist legend eclipses are caused by the unleashing of Rakh, the god of chaos and destruction. All of Ulaan Baatar's monasteries were planning services of counteract the eclipse's baleful influence. In a statement released to the media—he was unavailable for interviews—Lama Sh. Soninbayar, a teacher at the Gandan Buddhist University in Ulaan Baatar, said, “The solar eclipse is not a holiday or a celebration for Mongolia's Buddhists. We will chant special Sutras during the eclipse—the Doded, Jambatsanjod, and the Thousand Taras are used during times such as these to protect people's lives and to try to instill peace in their minds during this calamity.” The lama also predicted that wild animals all across Mongolia, traumatized by the power of Rakh, would howl in pain during the eclipse and that human beings in any part of the world might resort to bizarre if not downright dangerous behavior in its aftermath.
Of course, not everybody bought into this take on Rakh. The bronze, silver, and gold commemorative medallions being sold to honor the eclipse featured a depiction of the sun being consumed by this very god of death and chaos.
Before leaving for Mongolia I had made arrangements with Boojum Expedition's silver-maned chieftain Kent Madin for transportation to the eclipse viewing sight at Darkhan, 136 miles north by road from Ulaan Baatar. In the event, this would not have been necessary, since Mongolian Airlines, which does not normally fly to Darkhan, had laid on at least nine special flights between Ulaan Baatar and the city, and seats were available right up until the last moment. Also were scheduled buses and trains between the two cities, plus free-lancers hauling passengers by car and van.
Nevertheless, I met the Boojumites when they arrived at the airport on the morning of March 7 and crowded onto one of their four big Japanese-made buses. The various astronomy magazines in the States had billed this eclipse as only for the most hardy souls willing and able to brave the frozen wastes of Mongolia in mid-winter, and I had supposed the group would be mainly rough and ready adventure travel types who also had a passing interest in astronomy. Instead many appeared to be retirees on their way to a winter vacation in Orlando, Florida who somewhere along the line had made a seriously wrong turn. True, there was a man from NASA leading of small sub-group of serious cosmos-heads (they haughtily ignored the rest of the Boojumites); a coterie of amateur eclipse chasers who apparently go to all total solar eclipses (Peru, Cambodia, and Hawaii were just a few of the more recent stops); a woman from the office of the Hubble Telescope and assorted techno-nerds, but many appeared to be simply joy riders; indeed, some were following up this jaunt with a boat trip on the Yangtze River.
After a pit stop in Ulaan Baatar for snacks, bottled water, and beer our caravan rolled north towards Darkhan, Mongolia's second largest city (pop. 86,000). Although this road is one of the main highways of Mongolia—it connects the capital with Darkhan and the Russian border— it is bumpy and narrow and we expect to take over five hours to cover the 136 miles to Darkhan. There is no snow for the first twenty or thirty miles, just flat or gently rolling expanses of sere steppe stretching off to jagged ridges miles in the distance. Scattered herds of thin cattle, some draped with blankets to protect them from the cold, and tightly bunched flocks of sheep wander the undulating plain, watched over by sentinels on horseback wearing long robes and immense fur hats or by shepherds on foot with long staffs. Occasionally we pass a lone ger - the round canvas tents in which Mongols live - or a small settlement of gers surrounded by corrals. At one point overflow from a small creek has covered the road with a thick hundred yard-long lens of ice which our buses detour around by driving across the steppe. It's no problem - the ground is smoother than the roughs of a lot of public golf courses and of course frozen as solid as concrete. As we move farther north more snow begins to accumulate on the northern sides of the foreground ridges and in the distance can be seen high, stark, completely white mountains. There are of course no facilities on the entire road. During rest stops woman go to the left side of the road and men to the right. The sight of over one hundred people relieving themselves on the Mongolian steppe is not edifying.
High on her speculative tower
Stood Science waiting for the hour
When Sol was destined to endure
That darkening of his radiant face
Which Superstition strove to chase,
Erewhile, with rites impure.
William Wordsworth, "The Eclipse of the Sun"
At four in the morning Hale-Bopp is clearly visible from the balcony of my room. Its two-pronged tail seems to have gotten even more pronounced in the last couple days. A few other insomniacs pad through the halls, and a small contingent of NASA types keeps vigil on the comet from the roof of the hotel. In a tiny temple on the second floor three young lamas from the Kharagiin Monastery in Darkhan quietly chant in front of several dozen flickering candles. By six a blanket of ice fog rolls in, blocking the view, and the night owls head for the dining room where the waitresses have laid out packets of instant coffee and thermos of hot water.
Young monks from Kharagiin Monastery
Ger camp set up at Darkhan especially for the eclipse
The ger camp catered to all needs: a bar with brothel on the side. 
Lamps for the Thousand Lights Ceremony
Lighting lampsCirculating through the crowd were men hawking beautifully chased knives and daggers and gleaming three foot-long swords with coral and stone encrusted hafts; dozens of artists with the ubiquitous water color miniatures of rural scenes; a bevy of dolled-up teen-aged girls selling "dinosaur eggs" which appeared to be nothing more than river cobbles; dandiprats hawking hastily patched together albums of common postage stamps; and a assortment of sad sacks peddling crudely carved wooden toys, tattered postcards, single cigarettes, tiny plastic Buddhas, Lenin pins, and other detritus.
“Hey you, wanna buy a dinosaur egg?”Assembled in the huge field in front of the hotel stood a half dozen camels assuming their usual look of haughty superiority. Indeed, they appeared quite regal in their thick lustrous winter coats. Nearby pranced a couple of dozen horses with riders. At first the camel and horse owners wanted money even to take pictures but soon gave up in the face of an onslaught of snap - shotters. Camel rides for foreigners were five dollars, or a dollar if you dug in your heels. Many tourists thought posing on camels was too hokey, but dozens of Mongol kids, paying discounted fees in togrogs, climbed on board to the howling laughter of their companions, The horsemen, many of them teenagers, were in full regalia—immense wolf and dog fur hats and colorful gowns and sashes—and for a buck they would pose and then let you ride one of their horses around the hotel.
Camel assuming its characteristically haughty pose
Ride’em Reindeer Girl!
Golden Eagle
Please, do not make eye contact with the eagle!It was not a merry band of campers who assembled on the Boojumite buses the next morning at 6:00. We left the hotel in a flurry of snow which even the buses’ headlights had trouble cutting through. Many who had chattered non-stop for five hours on the road to Darkhan now stared gloomily ahead, lost in their own meditations. A lot would have close to $5000 wrapped up in this escapade before it was all over, and now it seemed almost certain the main event was going to be washout.
We passed the umbra's center line at 38.5 kilometers north of Darkhan and continued on another 12 kilometers to a high point known as Khamar Pass, which our leaders, on a scouting expedition the day before, had chosen as our viewing site. Someone with a GPS gave the coordinates as N49°50'757" and E106°13'683". By 7:15 a cold, gray, sun-less dawn had broken. The snow had stopped completely; the temperature was 12°F.
People scrambled up the slopes on either side of road and jockeyed for position on four or five different rocky knobs. I claimed my spot along side a stocky, bearded German with little English, a tall, gray-haired American women decked out in a purple deel she had bought in Darkhan, and a half dozen Mongolian men.
Above the ridge to the east was a thick belt of slate colored cloud through which the sun was at first just barely detectable. At exactly 7:49 someone yelled "First Contact!" This is the first moment that the sun begins to be covered by the moon. Had the sun been visible, within a few minutes we would have been able to see just a sliver shaved off its side by the encroaching moon. Precisely 59 minutes and 55 seconds later "second contact," when the moon completely covers the sun, will begin.
A solar eclipse occurs, of course, when a new moon, passing between the earth and sun, casts a shadow on the earth’s surface. The moon, orbiting the earth, comes between the earth and sun once every 29.5 days, but it's usually just above or below a straight line between the sun and earth and thus no eclipse occurs. When the moon does pass directly between the sun and the earth both a partial shadow, known as a penumbra, and a complete shadow, or umbra, result. During partial solar eclipses the penumbra darkens the earth’s surface, but the umbra passes through space just above or below the North or South Pole. The penumbra can cover a swath of earth up to 5000 miles wide, and thus partial eclipses are most often seen by the greatest number of people. There are also annular eclipses, when the umbra passes over the earth, but is not long enough to reach its surface. This happens when the moon is farther from the earth than usual and does not cover the entire sun during eclipse. What we see is a ring of sunlight around the moon.
During total solar eclipses the umbra touches the earth’s surface. Traveling at several thousand miles per hour, the umbra can darken a swath just slightly over two hundred miles wide, and only those in its path will see a total eclipse. There are on average slightly less than seventy total eclipses a century, and it has been estimated that only one human being in a thousand is at the right place at the right time to see one in the course of a life time. Many, of course, will pay big bucks to place themselves in the path of totality and thus increase their chances.
Total solar eclipses are possible only because of the odd coincidence that the sun is both 400 times the diameter of the moon and 400 times farther from the earth than the moon. Thus they appear to be of about equal size in the sky, and the moon, when in the proper position, can entirely cover the sun. If the moon, 2160 miles in diameter, were only 140 miles smaller, no total solar eclipse could occur on earth, since it could not totally block out the sun.
By 8:05, seventeen minutes after first contact, the sun had cleared the dark clouds just above the horizon and entered a lighter nacreous layer. For a brief moment it flared brightly, fanning everyone's hopes that there just might be a hole in the ceiling, but then faded again, leaving only an orange ball of indistinct shape which could comfortably be looked at with the naked eye. Only with solar viewing glasses, which cut out a lot of the light diffused by the clouds, could you just barely make out the ever-growing bite being taken out of the sun.
The gloomy scene as the moment of the eclipse approached. At this point many were wondering if they should not have waited for the next solar eclipse, which was visible in the Caribbean Islands.
Saros cycles do not go on forever; they last about 1200 years and include between 65 and 75 eclipses. The eclipse we were watching was the sixtieth in saros series 120, which has a total of seventy-one eclipses. The next eclipse in saros series 120 will occur on March 20 2015, and the last, the seventy-first, on July 7 2195.
At 8:38—ten minutes and fifty-five seconds before the beginning of totality at our position—just a yellowish sliver of sun could be seen through the nacreous clouds. At 8:41:18 the umbra, barreling northeastward at 4240 miles an hour and covering a swath of earth almost two hundred miles wide, crosses the border between Mongolia and Kazakhstan. Thirty-seven seconds later it sweeps over the Mongolian city of Olgii, 1050 kilometers to the west, plunging it into darkness. It's seven minutes to totality at our site and there are still no visible effects in the sky or the landscape from the approaching umbra. The yellowish sliver of sun is visibly diminishing however. At 8:46:22 the umbra passes over the city of Moron, just south of Lake Khövsgöl, 411 kilometers to the west. Now it is slowing a bit, moving at perhaps 3700 miles per hour. At two minutes and thirty seconds to totality on our knoll the atmosphere has darkened but at the same time seems curiously more pellucid. The rocky knobs nearby, the people standing on them, the straggly bushes, everything suddenly appears in high relief again the white snow background. About thirty second later a wave a frigid air washes over us from the direction of the approaching umbra, dropping the temperature five or ten degrees and chilling the sweat dripping down my backbone. Someone yells "One Minute!" The southeastern horizon darkens ominously and the light at our location dims. At 8:48:55 the umbra, now 197.00 miles wide, sweeps over us at 3571 miles an hour.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrevocably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day.
John Milton, "Paradise Regained"
The best available view of the eclipse at DarkhanA total eclipse of two minute and twenty-four second is not especially long; in theory totality can seven minutes and thirty-one seconds, and the longest eclipse of this century, in the South China Sea on June 20, 1955, lasted seven minutes and 7.7 seconds. About two minutes after second contact the horizon starts to lighten in the southwest. Totality ends at 9:52:48. Moments later a wall of roseate light appears on the horizon far to the southwest and sweeps over us at incredible speed, tingeing the vast snowy landscape a delicate pink. The German beside me sputtered something and several Mongolians gasped loudly. Then it was gone and we were all standing in weak, mundane daylight, as if at daybreak.
Like, uh, where’s the eclipse?Back in Ulaan Baatar the news media soon declared the eclipse a flop. Not only had it not been visible, but the expected hordes of cash-laden visitors had not materialized. At final count only about 1600 foreigners had traveled to Darkhan. S. Batchuluun, the Mongolian organizer of the Boojumite group, opined that overall organization, despite all the planning committees, had been very poor and that a lot of Mongolian tourist companies were going to lose big bucks. (He did not include himself in this forecast.)
Predictably, one of the biggest losers was the “Great Khaan’s Dinner Show,” which had gone down in flames at the Chinggis Khaan Hotel. The producers lost 30 million tögrögs (over $36,000) and were being sued for non-payment by several of the scheduled performers. The chief organizer of the event, Ch. Erdenedalai, was hospitalized for "extreme stress" caused by the debacle. The Naraantuul Trade Company had laid in a stock of 10,000 “eclipse viewing spectacles” and sold only 2000 of them; unfortunately there are no more total eclipses scheduled for Mongolia until the year 2008. Saddest were the Tsaatan reindeer herders who did not even make enough money for their transport home. Marooned in Ulaan Baatar, they were reduced to giving reindeer rides in the city park. Several of their reindeer, not used to the relatively warm climate in Ulaan Baatar (by mid-March the temperature was climbing into the low twenties in the afternoons), soon died. One of their leaders said they hoped to be out of town by July.
The 30 million Japanese who watched the eclipse back home in Japan probably got the best deal. A Japanese film crew for NHK TV flew above the cloud cover in a helicopter and got good video of totality. Their Mongolian pilot was reported as saying that he had never seen anything "so amazing. I really didn't expect what confronted me. There were stars and a bright light shining next to the sun [probably Hale-Bopp]."
Back in February Mongolian lama and astronomer J. Gonchigsuren had predicted that if snow fell on the fifth day after the eclipse a spell of severe weather would follow. Perfectly cloudless skies reigned for four days after March 9, but on the fifth an unseasonable blizzard dumped six inches of snow on Ulaan Baatar. I trudged through mounting drifts to the Flower Hotel and logged onto to the Internet, where news sources reported the usual succession of civil and religious wars, mass murders, earthquakes, floods, famines, and epidemics, but I far as I could discern there were no unusual spikes. No major rulers had fallen, Bill and Hillary were still in the White House, none of the expected fallout from the Hale-Bopp companion had yet to appear, and the Earth appeared to be still rotating smoothly on it axis . . . but we all know what happened after that . . .
If I had been prescient enough to go to Chita, in Siberia east of Lake Baikal, instead of Darkhan, to view the eclipse I would have gotten this perfect view of the so-called Wedding Ring effect. Photo by my friend Boris Dmitriev from Irkutsk, who was prescient enough to go there.
