Before the eclipse began, I spent hours interviewing eclipse chasers and capturing the carnival-like atmosphere on the beach. I love the buzz before an eclipse! If you have never experienced this - you don’t know what you are missing. An eclipse is the most intense event you can possibly imagine and the characters it draws from around the world are colourful to say the least. So passionate about their hobby!

Eclipse chasers!

An hour before the eclipse began the sky clouded over. Yikes. Not what eclipse chasers want to see. The drama is great, but if it goes on too long people start to get very unhappy. Fortunately, it blew over almost as quickly as it arrived and the pristine Caribbean skies we had heard so much about returned to our site. I breathed a sigh of relief. I would have been inconsolable if I had brought my family and friends all this way to a cloud out. But the eclipse gods were on my side! As they were for all the chasers scattered around the Caribbean for this event.

Partial eclipse through a pair of binoculars. Don’t ever look through binoculars at a solar eclipse!

eclipseguy talks solar system dynamics with Hooked On The Shadow film editor Sarah Peddie.

A piece of cardboard punched with pinholes betrays the sun in partial eclipse.

You have got to see the video from this eclipse! Get your copy of Hooked On The Shadow now!

Henry Czerny took this great shot of totality at Baby Beach.

The eclipse was perfect from start to finish. Incredible location. Cloudless skies. Intense, asymmetrical corona adorned by Venus and Jupiter on either side. A picture can’t do justice to the overwhelming effect of a solar eclipse.

Venus and Jupiter adorn the eclipsed Sun. Planets and stars are always visible during a TSE.

We bathed in the glory of the umbra for three minutes and thirty-four seconds - a very healthy dose of universal magic. From Aruba, we all came back changed.

Next stop: Turkey, 1999.

The team that made it happen in Aruba in 1998! photo Tony Makepeace