Nothing is quite so forlorn as eclipse photographers all turned out, gear at the ready, with nothing but clouds to photograph. The skies were not kind across much of Asia for yesterday's longest eclipse of the century.
From Gujarat in western India, where the Times of India headlined Weatherman predicts heavy rain today, through Tibet, where the photo at left was taken at the Potala in Lhasa (photo via Xinhua), right on through to Shanghai, gaps in the clouds were the exception.
Emei Shan, the 10,167 foot (3099 meter) peak south of Chengdu where our abortive eclipse trip would have taken us, showed solid clouds on radar. Danwei has a video that shows the sun and moon in and out of clouds at Wuhan, east of Emei Shan.
The BBC has a 2-1/2 minute video compilation, and also reports that a woman was killed in a stampede on the Ganges river bank in Varanasi, and that thick smog in Beijing (from which the eclipse was only partial) blotted out the sky.
Boston.com also has photos.
The web site eclipse-tv.com offered live images from near Shanghai for $14. We subscribed. After the jump, see a screen grab of the sky shortly after totality from their feed.
Somewhere behind the clouds in that grey box, there's an eclipse going on.
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