Maria Canton
Northern News Services

Pond Inlet (Aug 28/00) - What did 300 Pond Inlet residents have in common on the penultimate day of July?

They all donned safety glasses to view the partial solar eclipse that took place over, coincidentally, Eclipse Sound.

The glasses were sent courtesy of a California-based company called Rainbow Symphony, but the order for the heavily-tinted shades was placed by a Swiss eclipse chaser.

After extensive research indicated Pond Inlet would be the best vantage point from which to view the July 30 partial eclipse, Olivier Staiger travelled from his home in Geneva, Switzerland to the Northern end of Baffin Island.

"I'm always planning to discover a new continent on the occasion of an eclipse," said Staiger, a self-described eclipse chaser and amateur astronomer.

"The idea is always to see how close I can get to the deepest place of the eclipse. According to the NASA maps I was reading, Pond Inlet was the ideal location for this eclipse."

Staiger contacted Marian Ferguson at the Nattinnak Centre in Pond Inlet, ordered the glasses, packed the digital technology that allowed him to provide the world with a live web-cam broadcast of the event and departed for Pond Inlet.

The day before the eclipse, Ferguson arranged for an announcement to be made on the local radio, notifying residents of the eclipse and where they could get the safety glasses.

"We announced that one hour before the eclipse people could come to our house and pick up a pair of solar shades," said Ferguson, who is also the sole-proprietor of Tununiq Travel and Adventures.

"We gave away all 300 pairs."

Ferguson's back deck, which has an unobstructed view to the northwest, provided the venue for Staiger to set up his digital equipment.

The eclipse started at 8:33 p.m. and at 9:18 p.m. reached its maximum. By 10:04 p.m. the eclipse was over.

"The eclipse lasted about an hour and a half and almost half of the sun was covered by the moon," said Staiger.

The next eclipse Nunavummiut will be able to view will on Christmas Day and according to Staiger, the best place to see it from will be from Iqaluit.