The two-minute epic had received more advanced publicity than the new Star Wars movie but for those on the MV Normandy eclipse cruise, the full moonty (coming not very soon to a sky near you) proved that sometimes you can believe the hype.
Despite a determinedly cloudy sky, the almost 1,400 passengers aboard the ferry, strategically placed yesterday morning along the path of totality in the English channel off the island of Alderney, had some of the best seats in the house.
At exactly 11.11 a.m. everything the boffins said would happen did. It took just a few seconds for the morning sky to be transformed into an eerie dusk and a chill to descend. Protective eye wear was discarded as through thin clouds the sun's rim, the corona, was clearly visible blazing around the edges of the black moon.
For the two minutes of the total eclipse, the crowd stood still, awestruck and silent except for some ecstatic groans and whoops of joy while the sun and the moon hovered like a majestic alien spaceship above.
Those who had swatted up on eclipse terminology whispered reverentially to whoever was beside them: "There, that's the diamond ring," they said in the split second before the moon finally obliterated the sun and a flash of light glinted off its surface, sparkling like a jewel. "The man in the moon must be roasting" was a less well-informed but no less valid observation.
As the phenomenon - and it was a phenomenon incomparable to most other things the word is used to describe - unfolded, deep red and orange spots on the solar corona, were pointed out to us. And then, another dazzling diamond ring when the moon decided to move on. We hate to see you go, we thought, but love to watch you leave.
Earlier the crowd struggled to observe the partial eclipse which began shortly before 10 a.m., and the clouds threatened to turn the imminent moments of totality into not-at-allity.
The scenes on deck were surreal. Hundreds of people, necks craned upwards, wearing special eclipse shades which evoked images of people watching 3D movies in the 1950s. If the clouds parted enabling them to see the moon, which was by now taking what looked like large bites out of the sun, there were cheers.
If, as happened too often, the clouds masked the action, there were boos which at one point coincided with a frighteningly loud boom-boom. The ship's captain, John Gillespie, quickly got on the loudspeaker to explain that the noise was from a Concorde as it broke the sound barrier in the skies above.
There was a mixed bunch on board ranging from ecliptomaniacs to amateur astronomers to those who booked their passage months ago receiving a celestial cabaret as an unexpected but welcome bonus.
Dr Ian Elliot of Dunsink Observatory, an eclipse virgin until yesterday, wandered around enthusiastically answering questions and, some thought, choreographing the event. "Good luck," people said to him before the eclipse began. "Congratulations," they said afterwards. "They think I did it," he joked. "I wonder what they would have said if it went wrong."
Sitting quietly on the bridge of the ship, Vera Lynch (79), from Glasnevin in Dublin, was experiencing deja vu of astronomical promotions. She was just seven when her father took her out to their back garden to catch a glimpse of the last total eclipse anywhere near here, in 1927. The eclipse was just partial on that occasion.
"It was awe-inspiring," she said, clearly moved in the strange indefinable way that many people were by yesterday's display. This was solar physicist Dr Dipanker Banejee's third total eclipse, but he still managed to be "totally overwhelmed."
RTE's Thelma Mansfield was on the eclipse cruise with her husband, Johnny Morris, and her son, Roderick, an astronomy enthusiast. "I still haven't recovered," she said. "It was a humbling, mind-blowing experience . . . I was quite scared when the darkness came I was shaking and got this terrible eerie feeling." Some people around here got very emotional at the moment of totality, she said. One woman began to cry and hugged the television presenter, saying she missed Mansfield and wished her Live at 3 programme would be resurrected. A touch of the sun indeed.