We got a few pictures of the eclipse. Click on the link below for an expanded version of the image. This is a blown-up section of one of the pictures we took at totality.
My wife Virginia and I went to Poland for almost 4 weeks in late July through the middle of August. We were visiting Ryszard Szczerba at the Nicholas Copernicus Astronomical Center in Torun, Poland. I had visited Torun in 1995 but this was Virginia's first trip over to Poland. Ryszard arranged for us to stay in a small, but very nice, guest-house that someone had in the north part of the city.
Torun was a major trading city in the late middle ages, and still has a lot of buildings and fortifications from the period 1232 to 1600 still in existence in the old town, where Copernicus was born in 1473. The institute is in the old city close to the place where Copernicus is thought to have been born. Just down the street is a large church where Copernicus was baptised, which now has a statue of him -- he was a priest and only did astronomy on the side. There is also a statue of him right next to the old town hall. In addition there is "Copernicus Taxi", "Copernicus Cafe" at the train station, and so on.
The eclispe path was considerably south of Poland, so we took a bus through Slovakia to Hungary where we could see it. The trip was arranged by the Polish Astronomical Society, and so most of those going were from Poland; there were also 5 people from Germany who arranged to come through Ryszard as we did. We took a train to Krakow, Poland, on the Sunday before the eclipse. The bus left early the next morning. It took 14 hours to reach the destination of Siofok, Hungary. This is a resort town on Lake Balaton, about 2 hours drive south-west of Budapest. It was right on the central line of the eclipse path. We arrived at about 9 PM and the whole place was packed with people out shopping, drinking beer in various restaurants, and so on. The next couple of nights were rather noisy with many people partying until the early morning.
The next day was free so we looked for a good place to see the eclipse, finally settling on a quay that went out into the lake. It had a walk-way out to the end, prehaps 150 meters out from the shore. The idea was to not have buildings and trees in the way of pictures, but it was a public part of the beach-front. So the next day when we went there for the start of the eclipse at about 11:20 AM it was already rather crowded with people. The same was true of all the surrounding beaches and parks. We had borrowed a 35-MM camera from Fred Babott which we proceeded to set up on the quay.
The sky was clear near the Sun at first contact (when the Moon started to block part of the Sun from view) but as the eclipse continued some high clouds formed which caused us to get nervous. Totality was at about 12:50 PM, so we waited and took pictures every 10 minutes or so using welding glass in front of the camera, along with looking at the progress ourselves. People kept coming to the quay until right before totality, so it was really packed by the time 12:45 PM came by. At that point the clouds were banded but were thining out, so, whereas 20 minutes previous things were looking bad, we actually got a good view of the 2 minutes 23 seconds of totality. Right when the last part of the solar disk was disappearing people started cheering. Things got quite dark in the last 15 minutes or so, and the temperature went down. We also saw some birds fly over to roost on the lake right at the start of totality.
Finally totality came and we could look at things directly. It was a beautiful sight, but spooky to see a black disk in the sky rather than something bright. The corona showed up fairly well and was bright enough that we could not see any stars off hand, although we did easily see Venus and other people told us afterwards that they could see Mercury. Virginia took some pictures during totality until the end of the roll of film, then just watched things.
At the end of totality one little part of the Sun was uncovered first, and since there were still high, thin clouds around we could see a halo around the dark circle of the Moon, with a tiny bright patch on one edge, which looked rather neat. This persisted for some seconds before any more of the Sun came out from behind the moon, so either it was a bright solar flare that we were seeing or there was something like "Bailey's Beads" occuring. Then the sky brightened up again and people started to leave. We waited another 45 minutes or so watching the solar crescent expand again then went off for lunch. Ironicly, the high clouds were totally gone 20 minutes after totality ended.
The streets of Siofok near the beach were still filled with people when we went back to our hotel, but that evening and over night things were quiet compared to the previous two nights. We found out from Sky News (a British all-news channel) that the eclipse was mostly clouded out in England and through to Germany. Later we heard that another eclipse group from Torun which had gone to the other side of Lake Balaton, some 10 km away from where we were, got clouded out at totality, so we were very fortunate to see things with only a few thin clouds.The next day, Thursday, we left on the bus and spent a couple of hours touring Budapest, with Polish commentary that we did not understand. We did see many monuments, and a really impressive old cathedral. Then we left for Krakow and got in fairly late that night. The next day we went with Ryszard and his family to see some sights in Krakow, which was the old capital of Poland. Then we went back to Torun by train the following day. So the whole thing took up the entire week.
After that things were somewhat anti-climactic, but we did some more sightseeing in Torun and then in Warsaw the day before we left. All in all it was a very memorable trip.