The largest audience in history for a solar eclipse gathered Tuesday along a narrow arc of land running from the Isles of Scilly off western England to eastern India, waiting for a celestial show that will last just a couple minutes.
A billion or more people could witness the last eclipse of the millennium, which will occur at 11:11 a.m. local time Wednesday over England’s Cornwall and Devon Counties and last until 11:13.
Starting off the coast of Nova Scotia, the eclipse will move at 2,000 m.p.h. from over the southwest corner of England to Normandy in France, Stuttgart and Munich in Germany, Graz in Austria, southern Hungary, the Romanian capital of Bucharest, Diyarbakir in Turkey, Mosul in Iraq, Isfahan in Iran, Karachi in Pakistan and Akola in India. It will peter out over the Bay of Bengal off India’s east coast.
The path of totality will be about 100 miles wide, but millions living beyond that band will be able to see a partial eclipse. The eclipse will not be visible anywhere in the United States.
Forecasts of cloudy weather over the British and French eclipse zones only partly deterred people from traveling there for a chance to witness the last eclipse in this country until 2090 and the last in continental Europe until 2081.
Cornwall, with a population of 480,000, had an estimated 1 million visitors by midday Tuesday and more were arriving at the rate of 2,500 per hour. It represented the largest movement of people in England since armies tramped across the country in World War II.
Forecasters said a weather front would move into the area from the Atlantic on Wednesday morning, and chances of seeing the eclipse in the westernmost area of Cornwall and Devon were 15 percent or less.
“An eclipse is the most magnificent sight in all nature,” said famed British astronomer Patrick Moore, who has made his base at Falmouth in Cornwall. “It will be tragic if we don’t see it.”
Those with the most privileged view of the eclipse will be passengers aboard two chartered supersonic Concordes, who have paid $2,540 each to witness it from a height of 60,000 feet while sipping champagne and munching smoked salmon.
They will be able to chase the total eclipse for about 10 minutes, five times longer than people on the ground will experience the event.
In the English Channel off the coast of Cornwall and Devon, an estimated 500,000 people will try to watch the eclipse from a flotilla of 100,000 large and small boats.
“There has never been a maritime gathering like this. It’s bigger than Dunkirk,” said Richard Day of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. He referred to the evacuation of British soldiers from the French port of Dunkirk by 700 small boats in 1940.
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Agency has said Isfahan, where there is a 96 percent probability of clear skies, might be the best place on land from which to see the eclipse.
Some American astronomers and former astronaut Russell Schweickart have traveled there, and Iran has waived visa requirements, hoping to earn $20 million from tourists. But Iranians have been warned of nefarious American attempts to profit from the eclipse.
“The Americans are trying to penetrate Iran’s scientific institutions for various reasons so they can achieve their political goals by different means,” the Tehran newspaper Jumhuri-ye Eslami said.
In Bucharest, the only European capital that will experience a total eclipse, Italian opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti will sing at an outdoor eclipse concert, with tickets selling for $200 apiece. American opera star Jessye Norman will sing in Reims Cathedral in France immediately after the eclipse.
Bucharest will have the maximum duration of total eclipse, 2 minutes 27 seconds. Akola, India, will get only 55 seconds, but in most places it will last about two minutes.
Paris will not be in the eclipse path, but fashion designer Paco Rabanne has written a book in which he predicts Paris will be incinerated on Wednesday by the Russian space station Mir falling on the city. Rabanne, basing his prediction on the writings of the 16th Century astrologer Nostradamus, has closed all his shops and left town.
Skeptics will hold a party outside his boutique on the fashionable Rue du Cherche-Midi at 12:23 p.m., one minute after the time he forecasts Paris will cease to exist.
In Lyon, more skeptics have announced they will establish a provisional government for France should Rabanne prove correct. They propose to name a Minister for Reconstruction of Paris on Wheels, so the city can be rebuilt and moved elsewhere if disaster looms again.
Fecamp, on the Normandy coast, will have the longest period of total eclipse in France, and authorities have estimated 5 million visitors could descend on the area.
In Rio de Janeiro, Hippo, one of the city’s hottest nightclubs, planned to celebrate the end of the world on Tuesday night with bouncers dressed as the Grim Reaper and a giant clock on the stage counting down the minutes until the eclipse occurs.
“If this is going to be the end, then it’s going to happen with a party,” Tatiana Medeiros, 24, one of the organizers of the event, told Brazil’s Veja newsmagazine.
A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the sun and Earth and blocks its light. The word eclipse derives from the Greek word for abandonment.
Nowhere else in the solar system can this precise event occur. The sun is 400 times the size of the moon, but exactly 400 times farther away, and this enables the moon to cover the exact dimensions of the sun, leaving around it only a corona of light that normally is not visible.
Every year, between two and seven eclipses occur in various parts of the world. But none has covered such a heavily populated area as this one.
Over England, the period from which the moon takes its first bite out of the sun, covers it and then moves away will span 74 minutes.
During the two minutes of total eclipse, the Earth will grow dark, stars and planets will be visible, temperatures may drop 20 degrees and the wind will rise.
Birds will go silent, nocturnal animals may emerge and flowers will begin to fold their petals.
It can be an eerie experience, a reminder for many of the fragility of life. In the 14th Century, the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV of Bavaria died of fright during a total eclipse.
Primitive people have long believed that during an eclipse the sun is being devoured by a dragon, a giant frog, a wolf or other animal. American Indians tried to relight the sun by firing flaming arrows into the sky. Even in modern Romania, peasants in rural areas ring bells during an eclipse, an ancient tradition originally designed to frighten away the monster eating the sun.
Five Albanian families have taken refuge in a communist-era air-raid shelter in a remote area of the country because of media speculation that the eclipse will be accompanied by a biblical-scale disaster. They took their cattle, food and cooking utensils with them.
Many people who witness eclipses are so fascinated that they chase them to various parts of the world. The dean is Bernard Milet, 74, a retired Nice astronomer who has witnessed 22 eclipses, including one in Gabon in 1984 that lasted just three-quarters of a second.
Eclipses also are important to Druids and other sun-worshipers. Ed Prynn, 62, arch Druid of Cornwall, has created an eclipse dance performed to music that contains these lyrics:
“Wiggle your hips and think of the eclipse. Shuffle your feet and think of the heat.”
Prynn, who was busy on Tuesday doing a sun dance to clear the sky of clouds, said, “The eclipse is one of the biggest mystical events of all. The darkness symbolizes evil and death, and the light represents rebirth and goodness.”
Stuttgart, Germany, expects 500,000 eclipse visitors, including Keltic Kultur followers who aspire to an austere lifestyle.
All across the long arc of the eclipse, authorities have warned people not to look at the sun directly. Inevitably, some people do and go blind.
In some countries, authorities fear that unscrupulous traders have sold people so-called eclipse-viewing glasses that cannot be used safely.
David Berger-Jones, 12, from Chapel Hill, N.C., has been flown to England by the charity Fight for Sight to help publicize the dangers. Last year, wearing special goggles that were supposed to be safe, he viewed an eclipse through a telescope in the local planetarium and burned a hole in the retina of his left eye that has left him partially blind.
Sheik Mohammed Mehdi Shamseddin, religious leader of Lebanon’s 1.2 million Shia Muslims, has issued a ban on watching the eclipse. Any action harmful to the body, he said, is prohibited by Sharia, the Muslim holy law.
