Emīls writes:
This morning began very early. I’ve slept for some two hours because me and Agnese decided to join Couch Surfers at their beach party. So we spent a few hours at the fireplace near the ocean and talked a lot about astronomy at the same time looking high in the sky. There were clouds but there were some stars as well. At the beach we could see the low tide – the water was more than a hundred meters away. Maybe even two hundreds – it was hard to tell in the dark. When we went in the water and started splashing, we could see strange lights. I think it was luminescence of plankton. It was the first time I see something like this.
In the morning at 5 AM we went to the reserved place on the beach where we planned to observe the eclipse. There were not so many people as I thought there would because the sky was quite cloudy. We observed the sunrise at the horizon, bet when the Moon started to eclipse the Sun 10 minutes after the sunrise, the clouds came over. So we saw the eclipsed Sun only when the Moon had covered almost half of the Sun. I managed to get nice pictures although there were many clouds blocking the Sun for certain moments. Only a few minutes before the full phase we started to notice that the light becomes strange, clouds in the sky started to become pink, sky at the horizon became orange, just like after sunset. When the full eclipse began, many people started to shout, clap their hands and so on. In a moment the clouds separated and we could see the eclipsed Sun with its corona shining beautifully around it. All photographers grabbed their cameras and started to take pictures, some people filmed the event. In two minutes the full phase ended, producing a spectacular diamond ring – an effect when the Moon reveals the first bright-shining part of the Sun (Sun’s photosphere). Maybe the view from other places in Cairns wouldn’t be so good because of the clouds. But we got really lucky. At the end of the eclipse we noticed some interesting shadows on the ground and on buildings – leaves from trees produced many images of the crescent Sun.
Straight after the eclipse ended we went home, took our bags and went to the south of Cairns. We visited one waterfall that was on our way, but it didn’t put a big impression on me. We spent the rest of the day driving in cars. On our way we stopped to buy some delicious bananas, watermelon. In the supped we had mashed potatoes with canned meat. We felt quite tired because of the long way and many hours spent in the cars. Even this night was clear with skies full of stars, I didn’t have much energy left to look for some unknown constellations. So I went to sleep quite soon.