Report from Jonathan Kern in Messina

We arrived in Messina late Sunday afternoon after an all day drive from Kruger Game Park. Spectacular drive through mountains into North-East South Africa. Temperatures rose along the way. Monday dawned cloudless and very hot. Seemed as hot as Mauritania in '73. We are hosted in a private residence in Messina and setup our instruments in the backyard. Private and secure with a 7' masonry fence surrounding the yard as well and 2 Golden Labrador guard dogs. Alignment went smoothly. Monday afternoon we drove 12km to the Zimbabwe border and looked across the bone dry Limpopo river. Apparently this region, including Zambia is experiencing a severe drought. Tuesday morning dawned clear again, but I could see clouds on the distant Southern horizon early in the day. I arose at 3am local time (GMT +2:00) this morning and observed dark southern skies. Even in town with a few streetlights I could see +5mag. Magellanic Clouds are always a special treat to observe. By 4am I could perceive that clouds were obstructing large areas of the sky, and by sunrise the sky was 50% scattered. Things kept getting worse at by first contact (7:12am) things looked bad. ~80% scattered. The sky looked bleak until ~8am when a few openings appeared. I was able to track and set drive rates through the holes that passed our way. The final 15 minutes before second contact things began improving and totality was observed through a hole that passed our way just at the right moment. There were 2 levels of clouds. High cirrus drifting to the North and low running scud coming from the ENE. Totality was predicted to last 68s in Messina. I ran a sequence of 4 exposures with the Newkirk camera. 2, 5, 40 and 10 seconds. Only towards the end of the 40s exposure did I observe some very tenuous low clouds moving into the field of view and they were so wispy that I decided to continue the exposure rather than cut it short. Everything went smoothly with the equipment and I will try to process the 120 roll film from the Newkirk camera when we arrive in Johannesburg tomorrow. We will stay there 2 days and depart for home Saturday night and arrive back in Baton Rouge Sunday afternoon.

Jan and Jonathan