Preparation for the Annular Solar eclipse began well ahead in December by ordering a T-ring with adopter for canon 40D and Mylar sheet. A friend of mine was travelling to Mumbai; requested him to drop by Tejraj (http://www.tejraj.com/) and pick up these stuffs for me.
Plan was to reach Kanyakumari one day earlier and hunt for a good nice locality for the event. Since we knew that Kanyakumari and or Rameshwaram will be crowded, We chose a hotel in Nagarcoil. This town is about 20KM from Kanyakumari.
On 14th we went around Kannyakumari and immediately dropped the idea of being closer to Kanyakumari, as all these places over crowded. I hate crowded places. We drove about 30 miles east towards Rameshwaram, travelling closer to the beach. We wanted to check out a town called Uvari. There is a nice church and dirty beach and lot of people around..
We went ahead further and found a deserted patch of beach. We decided to make this as our spot for shooting. Just few hundred meters away was another place next to a Siva temple and the beach seemed to be clean. There weren't many people around in the Siva temple and the beach seemed relatively barren of people. This was another contender for the spot. We chose this place and we kept the other spot as a backup. Our thinking was that these places have many orthodox people who wouldn't come out during the eclipse and hence the beach will be totally empty. This turned out to be totally wrong assumption. (Later we learnt that Bangalore was deserted during eclipse time where as this beach was buzzing with people and curious on lookers.)
Everywhere we had to hesitatingly tolerate the nuisances created by Ayyappa swami followers.
On 15th, we reached the shiva temple spot by 10.30, late by an hour as per the plan. Immediately setup the telescopes and sprung to action. Clouds did spoil the mood initially. But may be prayers of team mates and many people around worked... the sky was clear 95% of the time.
Check out the photos at : http://picasaweb.google.com/vhawargi/AnnularSolarEclipse?feat=directlink
