My China Total Solar Eclipse Trip – Part 1
I reached Hangzhou on 20 July, two days before the big day. It was hot! The temperature was 38 degC. Imagine yourself standing in front of an air-con compressor, and you know how uncomfortable it was.
We started to survey our observation site the next day. We have a few plans; the best is of course a place where we can include the famous West Lake as our foreground in our photos. The candidates were somewhere around the West Lake or one of it bridges, or a hill overlooking the Lake.
Our worry was that there may be too big a crowd if we observed in the vicinity of the West Lake. We hope to find somewhere not so famous, but still has a view of the West Lake (or any of its pagodas).
Having said that, we still ended up at a famous hill… Baoshi Shan 宝石山 (what to do, this is not our territory; if we can think of a place, surely the local will also know about that!). From our survey, the Sun position was too high in the sky to include the Lake (if you plan to have one frame from start to end), unless you have a very wide lens.
View of West Lake and Hangzhou City from Baoshi Shan
At first, we give up this location… remember? this is a hill! If we have to carry 20 kg of stuffs up the hill and still can include the Lake in our wide field photos, then is worth it, right? But if we just plan to do a shot without or unable to include any foreground, then observing anywhere in Hangzhou will be the same. And also, we are “afraid” of the crowd…
But eventually, we still ended up at this hill.
Route to Baoshi Shan with 20 kg of stuffs on our back!
To ensure that we will get a good spot, can you guess what time we went up there? 6 am? 4 am? No. We were there by 2 am! We climb all the way to the top in the dark…
And guess what? There were already some people up there!
to be continue…
Pagoda Baoshu 保俶塔 and Hangzhou City View at 5 am. The sky was very hazy and cloudy and we were very worried… The weather forecast for 22 Jul is not good – cloudy with chance of a thunderstorm.
My Dark Sky 