OK, I've been getting ready for this eclipse for most of a year. I've beefed up my solar telescope collection: here's two solar telescopes, plus a Unistellar eVscope I figured I'd use during the evening with the group, plus a big camera. The poster is one by my friend Tyler Nordgren, a full-time outreach asteronomer who has run astronomy programs in many of the US's national parks, and was planning to be in East Timor for this 2023 eclipse as a guide.

The totality path for this eclipse is super narrow - literally just a tiny 40 km peninsula off the coast of Western Australia, plus similarly narrow sites in Indonesia and East Timor.

This is the plan:

• Fly from Sri Lanka to Perth (via Singapore).
• Do an out-and-back charter flight to Exmouth to see the eclipse.
• Do a week-long tour of Western Australia.
• Back home to Sri Lanka.

Special bonus: the only previous total solar eclipse I've been anywhere near was the 1976 one in Melbourne. My mom says I probably went outside to watch, but she was also playing quartets at the time, so we don't really know. We left Australia the next year and I've never been back, so this trip gives me a reason to put my long-dormant Australian passport to use.

This is my dad's photo of our house in Melbourne during the eclipse on October 23, 1976. You can see from the crescent shadows that we're at about 90% totality here.

In Singapore, I met up with Vicky for a day. Singapore was the halfway point for me, and Vicky lived there many years ago. We hit the ArtScience Museum, which had a pretty neat interactive walk-through show.

... and to the top of the Marina Bay Sands hotel -- the giant three-pillared one with the pool up top. No, they would not let us in the pool... but we did have a beverage at the bar.

Overlooking Gardens by the Bay, which is Singapore's modernized botanic garden, including the famous steel super-trees on the right. To the left, the upper greenhouse is the Cloud Forest, which we all saw this summer when we took a family trip to Singapore.

Why do other countries get better Magnums than we do?? Top is Singapore; bottom is Australia.

Look, these OJ dispensers are the best thing in all of Singapore. $2 (which is less than 2 USD) and you get a full cup of cold juice, squeezed in front of you. It's incredible.

Another thing the US doesn't have: BTS-themed cold-brew coffee in cans, sold at 7-11. (BTS is a K-pop band.) I hope it's on the way.

I had one night in Singapore, staying near Chinatown. I headed out to find an obscure lithium watch battery. Totally unsuccessful, but Chinatown has some scenic markets. Check out those rambutans and dragonfruit!

Unexpected noodles! I hid in a hawker center (i.e., food court) to escape the rain. Most of the stalls were open, but one had a far longer line than any other - so of course I went to it: Ji Ji Wanton Noodles Specialist! It wasn't until after I was standing in line that I saw the large number of Michelin ratings. I wasn't swayed by the ratings one way or the other, but I really enjoyed the Char Siew Dry Noodle, which had a bit of everything in it (Bok Choi, pigs, crispies, yellow noodles, sauce, pickles, chili, saltwater, soup, berries, plus both fried and boiled wontons, all for $6).

The obligatory anti-durian sign. Look, I don't love that fruit more than any others, but I do feel sorry for it being singled out.

Made it to Australia! This was the first time I had come into the country since c. 1974. Was there anyone to welcome me in? Nope!! In fact, foreign tourists get to talk to a real border patrol officer... but I just got to swipe my passport, scan my face, and walk in.

Nice to see Orion and the Pleiades here. But I thought that maybe they'd feature some southern hemisphere objects, that you can't see from the rest of the globe. Where is the Southern Cross??

Made it to our hotel in Perth. It's kind of a Vegas-themed place with a lot of glitz and red hearts. (I understand this was a late change to the plan: Vicky worked hard to get a hotel downtown years ago, and it was canceled late in the game.)

The staff at our hotel is READY TO OBSERVE THE SUN! NASA's Heliophysics Division sent me a huge box of glasses + sitckers before I headed down, and I used them all.

With the Consul General at the US Consulate in Perth, Siri Nair. Australia has super-strong ties to NASA, and the Consulate plays a big role in keeping these going and building more. Much of NASA's planetary data comes down through the Deep Space Network stations outside of Canberra. The Australian stromatolites are of big interest to astrobiologists. Astronomers at Curtin University are visualizing data in new ways. NASA Heliophysics was flying a kite-borne spectrometer to study the corona during this eclipse. And on and on. I was only the most recent NASA visitor -- the NASA administrator (Bill Nelson) and deputy (Pam Melroy) had been there earlier in the year.

First full day in Perth. In collaboration with the US Consulate in Perth, I have a full day and a half of outreach events set up.

Here, I took two telescopes up to Kings' Park in Perth. We started at 8 AM on a Monday morning... and we had 500 people come by to see the Sun! It was incredible. I had two solar telescopes, and handed out hundreds of NASA solar glasses.

The crowd was coming for about four hours. We had about 500 people in total, with maybe 50-100 at any given time. Perth is going to see only a partial eclipse (70%), so I'm talking about that now: what they'll see, how to observe it, and so forth.

TV crews filming at the star-party in Perth. This student is looking at the sun in H-alpha, through one of the Lunt solar telescops I've brought.

Looking at the sun through the glasses! I gave out nearly 300 pairs of glasses at this event.

"My puppy, she's 16 years old this week. She can't see very well or get around, so I take her everywhere. Can I still see the sun through your telescope?" - at the Kings' Park star party, with the US Consulate in Perth.

The next day, the US Consulate has set me up to give a talk at Joseph Banks Secondary College (aka high school), in northern Perth. It was a school holiday... but still about 50 kids came out from break, to see the Sun and talk about NASA.

Looking at the Sun.

And interviews! I'm talking here with Taylah Strano, host and producer on RTRFM's 'Breakfast with Taylah,' in downtown Perth.

My hosts at the US Consulate did an amazing job! Hayley and Leigh are locals who know the media scene really well in Perth. I told them to keep me busy, and they did.

One more interview, this time at ABC (Australian Broadcasting). We're in the Perth studio, but this is a live interview for the nationwide mid-day show coming out of Sydney. I ended up doing close to a dozen interviews about the eclipse, and NASA-Australia collaboration.

Then we headed up to the Perth Observatory on the outskirts of town, to do an outreach program there. Behind us is an aboriginal depection of the sky. Note what we call Scorpio coming up through the emu.

The Observatory was built in 1896 in downtown Perth, and moved in 1966 to a super-beautiful site outside of town. I'm standing on the deck of their tallest telescope, which is a 24" scope on top of a 20-meter tower. This scope was used in the discovery of Uranus' rings by stellar occultation -- most of the data came from the flying Kuiper Airborne Observatory, but one chord was observed here.

Despite the clouds, we still managed to see the Sun in H-alpha through some holes, for the visiting group!

T-1 day for eclipse. We are visiting the Perth Observatory. This telescope is the one used in a super famous solar eclipse in 1919 to confirm general relativity experimentally. The telescope was taken to Africa (?) and pointed at the sun during totality, and made an image showing the position of several stars visible right next to the sun. Their positions were all off - because the sun's mass had bent the photons' path, which would only happen if relativity was correct.

At the hotel, Vicky and Kevin meet up after. Kevin runs the local tour operator that will be taking us around WA for the next 10 days.

We took a boat trip to Rottnest Island, a 40-minute boat ride from the Perth harbor. Rottnest is a super beautiful limestone island sitting in the shallow bay.

The big attraction on Rottnest Island are the quokkas, They're basically nano-kangaroos. They're marsupials and they jump on two legs, but they're the size of giant rats (thus the name, Rottsnest Island).

HIghly popular among the cogniscenti these days is to take a quokka selfie. Here's my attempts.

Eclipse day!!

The weather for Thursday looks fantastic. A week earlier Exmouth and northern Australia had a typhoon hit which caused a lot of bad weather, but that has mostly dissipated by now.

Getting on the bus for our 4 AM departure to the airport!

We are we flying to Exmouth? Two reasons: 1) it's a 15-hour drive, and 2) Once we got there, there would be no place to stay. It's a tiny town, and arranging a charter flight was the only practical way to get our group up there.

Getting on the bus... Vicky and our bus driver Sam at the front.

It's the 4 AM party bus! Bus driver Sam tells us that we're not alone: the title track of AC/DC's Highway to Hell was written about the very road that we're driving on right now (Canning Highway, Perth).

We've got a charter set up on Maroomba Airlines via Bendix Air Charter. Maroomba does actually exist: in fact, they operate a lot of charter flights around Australia. The guys in the background in yellow (you can see at least four of them) are all miners working on a 'FIFO' = Fly In, Fly Out program. They take a charter up, work hard for 10 days, then come back home for a week off.

Bob, Ross, and Arnold, walking out to our charter flight...

Hey, even the ground grew has the eclipse glasses!

Travis and I on the plane, with a crowd behind us. Andy and Chell are in the row behind us, with Jeff, Ross, Carey, Anne, and Bruce visible behind them.

The pilots of our 50-seat jet. It's a 3-hour flight to the tiny military airport at Exmouth-Learmonth.

Go Vicky! In 20 years of running eclipse trips, this was the second jet she's chartered -- the other one was a full 737 to Svaalbard. Jeff and Ross pay attention.

Heading for a landing in Exmouth. The airport is very small, and is used as a military base, so no photos allowed!

And here we are at the public viewing site! The town of Exmouth really went all-out to host a nice site. They had shade, water, lunches, cell coverage... and great weather. There were about 2000 people gathered at this site, which was directly on the path of totality.

Lots of telescopes set up by eclipse fans.

There are more expensive telescopes here than I've seen in a long time. Right there is a 152 mm Lunt solar telescope. Also note the T-shirt on the far right -- that's Tyler Nordgren's whale-shark art for this eclipse!

Chell and Andy observe.

OK, things are getting weirder. That's the shadow of my hand. The Sun is about 2/3 covered now, so instead of shadows being cast by a round ball, they're made by a long, thin crescent.

And the shadows of any aperture takes on the shape of the sun. Here, you can see the sun is about 2/3 covered. That's a piece of cardboard up top, with slits cut in it.

Everyone is playing with shadows! Zoom in and they're all crescents.

THIS WAS NOT ME! But hey, nice shadows -- zoom in and they're all crescents.

Waiting toward totality.

Exmouth may have enough police for its own 2,000 citizens, but not for 20,000 visitors. So there was a ton of imported security / medical / logistics support, with a lot of the support crew coming up from Perth.

I had my Lunt 80mm scope taking a timelapse of the sun for the entire 3-hour eclipse (first contact to last). Photo by Travis.

This was my first solar eclipse, and I had one goal: to not miss totality by taking too many photos! I'd heard too many stories of that. So I took one camera with one lens, and that's it. We're getting close to totality, so I pick up my camera for the first time, and take a few test shots with the Sigma 60-600 mm. No solar filter -- the sun was dark enough by this point it wasn't necessary.

Vicky, almost at totality!

Totality!!! Holy moly. It was just amazing. About one minute earlier, we started to see the shadow come in across the hills. From that moment, we were being sucked into a giant votex. Things got weirder and weirder, until... the sun completely vanished from the sky, replaced with a totally black hole The corona was bright, and sharp -- one of the sharpest things I've ever seen in my life. It looked SO UNREAL... like an amazing lighting effect and projection and shadows and mirrors. Wow.

Everyone told me the one-minute totality would go fast. I grabbed my camera, and fired off a nine-image sequence -- from 1/2000 to 1/4 sec, ISO 100, 600 mm. Then I put the camera down, and looked around. Only 7 seconds in! Looked around, took some more photos. Listened. Clapped. Saw Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. Looked at the crowd. Saw the blue sky on the horizon, and the black sky above. And then... only then, did the Sun start to come back, and we closed out the minute.

Totality!!! This is in h-alpha, with my solar telescope. It was taking images every 15 seconds for the whole duration of the eclipse. I was curious what this image would be like, as I'd never really seen an h-alpha image at totality. But the white-light shot, including the corona, is certainly much more evocative than this one.

Mosaic. The entire eclispe was 3 hours, and this sequence covers most of that. The image at the center is the one I took with the DSLR at totality; the rest are with the Lunt 80mm scope. I love how much activity was on the sun -- that flare on the bottom was always present, and just looked fantastic. The Sun follows an 11-year cycle, so it was comparably quite dead during the 2017 'Great American Eclipse.'

At right: full timelapse of the eclipse.

Photo by Travis of my telescope, during totality. Travis is an amazing astrophotographer who has spent decades taking images with some of the largest telescopes on Earth. (During the trip, he spent one day at the hotel, doing remote observing with the Gemini telescope in Chile.) He's done his share of great eclipse photography, and this time was here just with an iPhone.

OK... right after totality, ABC (= Australian Broadcasting Corp) was scanning the crowd for reactions. They walked past me as I was talking with Vicky, and asked for my comments. I was ecstatic... just so thrilled to see the eclipse, it was just mind-blowing and amzing and wow. And I told the reporter that, and I jumped up and down a few times, and the camera was running, so they got it all. My reaction turned out to get hundreds of thousands of hits on ABC's Instagram feed, and later in the week, people were coming up to me who had seen the live coverage: "Are you the guy in the red hat from the eclipse?" So, that was pretty fun... my 15 seconds of fame.

Instagram: NASA Program Scientist Dr Henry Throop was jumping for joy after witnessing the total solar eclipse in Exmouth, Western Australia.

Whoa! "Yeah, we just got married. We did it during totality. You know, there's the diamond-ring phase, and then Baily's beads, and we just thought it would be fun."

Bob shows a great shot of the diamond ring.

After totality, but before 4th contact, I walk over to the beach (20 meters away from the viewing site). There are a dozen surf lifeguards down there, so I figured it was a pretty popular surf break.

"No, we're not always here! We came up for the eclipse -- we drove all the way from Perth, just because Exmouth needed more lifeguards for the eclipse day. You have 2000 people here for the eclipse -- what if they all were to come into the water?" It's just symbolic of what a good job Exmouth did at hosting the event.

Group shot! We had a bus full of 50 people on tis trip. That's me, Vicky, and Travis in front.

We've passed 4th contact, so it's time to packup and leave. 2000 people were at this viewing site for totality two hours ago, and we're down to almost zero remaining.

We're the very last group to leave the Exmouth viewing site. There's no rush: our flight out has been moved, and we've still got 8 hours til we depart.

Why was it moved? It's a tiny aiport with parking for three planes, and today they had 15 charter flights landing and departing. It's probably more commercial flights than ever in its history. Any plane that lands had to take off immediately and clear space for someone else, so it was a super complex sequence, and we ended up being the last out.

Chatting with some locals as we leave the site. "That's my mom's house right over there. We saw the whole thing -- it was so cool!!"

What do do post-eclipse? We've got about 8 hours until our flight out. We walk around the town a bit, before heading to the local country bar. That's Brandon, Travis, Bill, and Karn around our table.

Time for some country music + beer, after being in the sun all morning.

Heading back to Perth! An hour earlier, we were told to stay inside because of a dangerous snake that had been seen. But now our plane is here, and the snake is gone, so goodbye Exmouth!

Check out that checked luggage: telescopes, tripods, and champagne!

A bit of post-eclipse in-flight champagne!

Next morning: we had a few hours to sleep, after getting back to the hotel well after midnight. We're loading up for a seven-day bus trip along the coast. We're actually retracing about 2/3 of the path that we flew the day before, though we're not going to make it all the way back to Exmouth.

At The Pinnacles, which is a geological site within Nambung National Park, several hours north of Perth. The formation are super-strange. It is not known what caused them, but they're moderately old. Most theory say they have something to do with trees: they're not petrified stumps, but perhaps the dirt around the tree was hardened in a way that it is much more resistant to subsequent erosion.

I'm doing the duck-lips thing since I hear that's what people do on Insta these days.

Billabong Roadhouse! Western Australia is large and empty, so it was a pretty big deal when we'd pull up to something like this, which we did every every few hours. Bathroom break and snacks!

Karen and Bill at the Billabong Roadhouse.

Our bus driver Jazzy at the ANZAC memorial in Geraldton.

Jazzy: "Well, I'm driving the bus for you all this week. But most of the year, I run outdoors trips. We go to Kilamanjaro, Everest, sometimes the Andes. Just really fantastic."

Me: "Oh, amazing! I'd love to do that sometime."

Jazzy: "Well, sorry! It's women-only on our trips!"

Vicky and Fritz on the bus.

Well, this is wild. We're at a beach, which is 100% made of sea shells. It's acres and acres: no sand, no rocks, just seashells on the beach. Apparently it's caused by a combination of shallow waters and high salinity.

We're on the shell beach.

You can't really see it here, but Western Australia has one other pervasive animal: flies. These $10 nets from the Billabong Roadhouse were well worth it, not to mention stylish for all of us. That's Paul, Rachel, me, Bob, and ___.

Western Australia is pretty empty. We saw lots of open road. These were the lone bikers in 1500 miles.

We get out of the bus to see some trees.

But as soon as we're out of the bus, Dan notices the moon setting, and shows it to Brandon. It's a tiny crescent, as it always will be one day after a solar eclipse. And it's beautiful and right on the horizon, so many of us stop looking at the trees and start pointing at the moon instead.

We've gotten to our northern-most point in Shark Bay, which is a place called Monkey Mia. The emus love walking around the campsites.

I guess I always thought that Vegemite was supposed to be used in limited quantities? But this serving arrangement implies that a nice big scoop of it on your toast might really hit the spot.

OK, we're all out on a boat cruise, on a nice catamaran. But hang on: there's a sunset, and a faint crescent moon to look at, so all the binoculars come out!

I'd heard of the Shark Bay area for a long time, as one of the few places in the world where stromatolites live. (Stromatolites are large clumps of bacteria that were the first known life on Earth, 3.5 - 4 billion years ago ago.) But it turns out it's a real hotbed of other activity too. It's a shallow, protected, warm sea, and that drives all sorts of things: sharks, high-saline creatures, strange shell formations, stromatolites, etc.

Stromatolites! These (or their ancestors) are the oldest known life on Earth! They're mats of bacteria, and they live in just two places on Earth -- Western Australia, and the Bahamas. The boardwalk was damaged by a cyclone a couple years back, so this is as close as we could get. But it was pretty amazing to get to see them, after seeing pictures in every astrobiology class ever taught. For what it's worth, Australia is also home to many fossilized stromatolites, which are still of huge interest to astrobiologists.

A subset of us made it down to Nature's Window, in Kalbarri National Park. From left, that's Vicky, Travis, Bob, me, Leoni, Dan, Ross (on top), and Alice.

We did not see much fresh water on this this trip! There is essentially one river that we passed during the entire 1500 mile trip, which is this one here -- the Murchison River. Atop it is the new Kalbarri Skywalk Platform, which is quite beautiful.

Sue get the bus in gear.

Back on the bus!

We didn't spent a lot of time driving at night.

Sue: "You see those cars that are following us now? In the outback, that's what's happens. You know why? Because we have a bigger roo bar than they do. No one wants to hit a kangaroo driving at night. It's horrible. But if you do, then you are much better off doing so in a large bus, than a small car."

It's ANZAC (= Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) day! It's a national holiday, which means that restaurants charge 10% more.

OK, Todd and I are jumping in the high-salinity lake, Hutt Lagoon. It gets the color from beta carotene and micro-algae.

More at the pink lagoon!

Such a beautiful day at the beach!

Day 8 of 10: we've got a long bus ride back into Perth, so Travis, Todd, and I each take the microphone and talk some science. Travis (in the back) talked about size scales in the universe. Then I talked about New Horizons.

Now, Todd is talking about Voyager! He is the propulsion engineer on the mission, and the relative 'baby' on the mission, having been on it for only the last 12 years or so.

And do check out the rest of Todd and the Voyager team's story, in It's Quieter In The Twilight", a new documentary on Netflix and elsewhere.

That's Bruce and Anne on the left.

Back in Perth, we take a quick trip to Penguin Island.

At the end of the last day, we finally get some koalas! This is at Yanchep National Park. And OK -- the koalas were not exactly wild. There's a fenced region with a boardwalk through it, that had four koalas behing rehabbed in it. The koalas sleep 20-22 hours per day. We could only find three of them. This one was actually moving around! It came down out of the tree.

Kangaroos! As common as they are, this was the first time we'd seen them up close. They are free-roaming, and particularly like the grassy areas of the park.

One final bus ride! Back to the hotel after dinner.

And back in the Colombo airport. I never fail to love the duty-free shopping at CMB. Forget about the Toblerones; what other airport will sell you tax-free refrigerators and washing machines?