On August 1, the high north was witness to a unique celestial phenomenon: a nearly full eclipse. From the perspective of Spitsbergen, the sun was covered up to 93% at 11:40am (more information found here ). Here at the Polish station, we ran outside at 11:30 and watched as the sun was slowly covered by the shadow of the moon.
This shot was taken with a Nikon D200 at 200mm through a 2mm thick sheet of filtered glass. Although the light outside was somewhat dusky, we still had sunlight:
Even with a few clouds in the sky, we were very lucky to get an excellent look at the eclipse, and watched over the following hour as the moon shadow slowly crossed the sun.
While taking these photos, we noticed that if you turned the filtered glass just right, you could catch the eclipse and the reflection on the glass…producing something like this:
(The eclipse is above the Longyearbyen sign).
Or this:
An incredible showing of a rare event!