Partial solar eclipse

Following the bad news about the weather at dawn, there were good news, then more bad news, then more good news. They day started with heavy rain and complete cloud cover, and the forecast for the evening was of dense clouds all over the western Alpine arc (these are all accepted facts of life for the calloused torinese, in case you don't know).

Still, even if it meant staring at clouds all night, I wouldn't let the opportunity pass, so around 17:00 I made my way to the Superga hill (in sweltering weather under a clear sky, of course). The view was reasonably clear — you have to be quite lucky to get a clear view of the valley at any given day anyway — and the sun could be seen quite distinctly through the mist, especially through the filtered camera lens.

The first sighting of the moon, approached by the sun from its southern side, was at 18:36 (all times are local: CEST UTC+02:00), and the awesome spectacle was clearly visible up to the very end — a tip: much better viewed through a telephoto lens than with the eye, even though the apparent magnitude of the solar disc at 300mm was roughly the same.

This miraculous Piedmontese weather continued almost to the very end. At 19:15, when the sun and the moon were a few degrees above the Graian Alps — somewhere between the Rocciamelone to the south and monte Lera and punta Soulé to the north, by my estimation — a large group of dense clouds travelling southward reached them, and concealed most of the last visible minutes of the eclipse.

The maximum cover of 93.3% was still more than one hour away, long after the setting of the sun behind the mountains, so this ended up being an amazing second spectacle for the evening, with the unique colors of the partially-eclipsed sun shining behind and around the clouds and the mountains. At 19:27 a sliver of the sun, by now almost fully eclipsed, showed itself at the edge of the mountain, before finally setting a minute later.

In the end was it worth preparing weeks in advance, enduring the unbearable 36°C summer heat, handling all the photographic equipment, standing there in the sun for three hours, waiting for the sixth bus because all the others were full, going to bed at 01:00, processing all the pictures, …? Well, I'll just say I'm already planning my trip to Spain next year.

E sí come secondo raggio suole
uscir del primo e risalire in suso,
pur come pelegrin che tornar vole,

cosí de l'atto suo, per li occhi infuso
ne l'imagine mia, il mio si fece,
e fissi li occhi al sole oltre nostr'uso.