July 11 2010 saw a Total Eclipse of the Sun in the South Pacific region. The path of totality crossed several small atolls and Easter Island, only making main landfall late evening in South America at the end of the eclipse as the Sun set. It was quite a long eclipse - over 4 1/2 minutes, so worth thinking about!

I and my wife had never visited the South Pacific (although she had been to Australia) so we decided this was a good opportunity to do a 'Round the World' trip. We tried to arrange an independent visit to Easter Island for the Eclipse itself, but even two years before it soon became apparent that the commercial interests had beaten us to it. But we signed up with an American organisation running a group based on Tahiti, and flying to an atoll to view the Eclipse.

We planned to visit a number of places we'd never seen before as well as call in on friends and relations dotted around the globe! And by careful planning with our local Travel Agent - many thanks to 'Julie' of Dawson and Sanderson in Hexham, it all eventually fitted together nicely. I also hoped to photograph some of the Southern Milky Way as well as the Eclipse itself, so had to decide what equipment to take.

As the trip grew closer, I became increasingly concerned about the weight problems in taking the originally planned set up for eclipse and astro photography using my Series 5000 80 mm refractor on my EQ3-2 mount. I considered a premium small refractor, but after considerable web browsing, in particular this site, I invested in the superb Canon EF 400 f5.6L prime telephoto lens. I also managed to reduce the size of the guiding system by using a small 300mm fl mirror lens which strangely although supposedly M42 lens thread screwed easily into the 'T' threaded XY guider without an adapter. Total weight saving a little over 3 Kg. Doesn't sound much, but with airline weight restrictions.... The lens has a built in retracting hood about 75 mm deep when extended - very useful for protection and stray light exclusion as well as dew prevention. The rig as shown here is in deep sky guiding mode, with a guide camera and the mirror lens side by side with the main camera, but for the eclipse photography only the camera and big lens was to be used. The odd looking object mounted on the camera 'hot shoe' is a red dot finder for night time use. Postscript. Would you believe after all that, shortly before the trip I was informed that our luggage allowance was almost twice that originally expected. So no need for the weight worries and I could have stayed with the 80 mm telescope! But in the end I didn't take the 80 mm - even with three suitcases our weight was on the limit for each case, and four cases would have been unmanageable when travelling, particularly in the Motor Caravan in New Zealand!

Our Itinerary covered several countries, so rather than fit them all on one huge page, I have individual pages for each location. Just click on the link, then there are forward/backward links on each page. We took many hundreds of photographs, but of course there is only room for a small selection here. The vast majority were taken with my Panasonic TZ5 - a very capable 'consumer' digital camera. All the 'thumbnails' are linked to larger versions. Just click on the thumbnail.

USA

South Pacific (and Solar Eclipse)

New Zealand (North Island)

New Zealand (South Island)

Sydney

Tasmania

Singapore