These pages are the work of Anne Line Norheim Langfeldt, also known as the wife and photographer, and Nicolai Langfeldt, the husband and sometime writer.
... in one of the least developed countries in the world.
When growing up, there are always things that appears to you to be so far away, so rare and so precious that it settles in your mind as something you will probably never get the chance to see or to experience. Such things can have their origin almost anywhere.., in a fairytale, in a book you've read, in a song you learned to sing... in things heard or seen.
What I remember to have heard of the solar eclipses as a child, is that they are ..... rare, and that they will not occur in Norway in my lifetime at all, so that a solar eclipse was something that was, almost by definition, something that was totally out of my reach. Except from this categorization as a spectacular, but not-to-be-seen-in-my-lifetime-anyway event, my interest for solar eclipses was of no special kind.
In the year 1997 I attended a course in astronomy at the University of Oslo. I am, in fact, a computer science student, but, there are of course funnier things to do than attending only computer science courses. At this introductory course in astronomy, our curriculum was covered by the book "In Quest of the Universe" by Karl F. Kuhn. And in the chapter about The Earth-Moon System there are a map showing solar eclipses around the earth from 1994 till 2017. In this time span, there was no less than 16 solar eclipses...! Wow! It didn't take me long to locate the one passing Europe at August 11th, 1999. From that day we had plans for a trip to Paris the second week of August 1999.
To make a quite long story very short, the day of August 11th 1999 arrived with something as trivial as clouds. During the day we saw spots of blue sky, but the solar eclipse was noticeable only by the fact that for two minutes, it grew completely dark. This was, of course, really a spectacular experience. So it was not really with disappointment we returned back home. We'd had some great days in Paris and a nice trip to Compiegne, where we did not see the eclipse.
But... I really wanted to see... Walking straight to the bookshelf to pick out "In Quest of the Universe", browsing to find the solar eclipse map. (At least this is how I remember it, but I probably put down my suitcase and even took of my jacket before doing this...). Well, OK, where is it next time? Looking at the map, my eyes searching for the closest date attached to the lines showing all the eclipses. What the map showed is that at June 21th, 2001, an eclipse will occur in the southern hemisphere, passing over southern Africa and Madagascar. Well, Africa? Fine!
And to make another even [to be continued...]