"The early morning sky was cloudy to the point where we missed 'first contact', the time at which the Moon starts to block out the Sun," says HAO's Scott McIntosh, who is heading up the Eclipse Megamovie Project with colleagues at NCAR and the University of California, Berkeley. This scientific cliffhanger had a happy ending: the clouds parted just before totality, allowing people on hand to witness the Sun fully obscured by the Moon above the Coral Sea for about two minutes.
