Per-Olof and I sat near Gullmarsplan Plaza, at the Kvarnen (Windmill) Café - surrounded by other guest having lunch or a beer. It was a totally cloud free sky and very warm. There we sat and like geeks looking up into the sky - with help of a large Kodak Wratten Gelatin filter i had bought in the end of the 80s, which had a Density of D 4.0 or ND 1000 / or was it ND 5.0 or 100.000 ?! 10 stops or perhaps 16.6 stops light reduction. I do remember that we could see the sun without damage to our eyes.

But i also have a vague memory of that i took the image without any filter. Instead stopping down the lens to a maximum aperture and shortest possible shutter speed - and let the film take the hit, with severe overexposure. (It turned indeed out extremely dense)

A small Eclipse

It was a small Solar Eclipse - a mere 10-15% like a small small bite...

So, the above photo is a tiny fraction out of a 6x6 color negative, which was still possible to recover the shape of the eclipsed sun, thanks to the extreme latitude of color negative films.

Obscure and Funny

The whole situation was a bit obscure - because no fuck was interested nor aware of this eclipse. And then you had those two young geeks enthusiastically making gestures together with sounds like "aaaah" and "oooh, and "loooook".

Well Per-Olof and I were crazy when we got together. Like two crazy brothers.

Summer "ended" after 24th May 1993

So, it was the 21 May 1993 - and we didn't know that after 3 days the summer for the year of 1993 would largely we over. After an extreme warm springtime, with temperatures already reaching 27°C in the end of April. The warmest springtime ever. During the period it was up to 5.5° degrees warmer than normal (compared with the old climate period of 1961-1990).

After 24th of May 1993, a cold front swooped away the warm air over Scandinavia. Temperatures fell from 27°C to 3°C within 1.5 days (in Märsta). From that date on and before summer starts on 1 June, Stockholm City had only 1-2 summer days above 25°C. That was it. No more, for June, July and August 1993.

Startling !

A period of 6-7 months followed, in which every month was colder than normal.

What a strange "summer"