Varkala, India’s laidback beach town, was buzzing with excitement this afternoon as locals, tourists and professional eclipse chasers observed the longest solar eclipse of the millennium. Shortly after 11 a.m., when the wind picked up and the sky started to dim, the crowd perched atop Varkala’s lofty cliffs began to swell.

Getting a hold of a pair of eclipse-safe glasses was challenging. Volunteers from India’s non-profit SPACE organization who had pitched a few tents near the ledge only had three pairs of glasses for circulation among hundreds. None were available for sale.

Luckily, a friendly volunteer quietly pointed me in the direction of a nearby hotel rooftop where SPACE’s scientific team had set up their telescope and monitoring equipment. I stayed up there for almost two hours along with a small group of other uninvited observers watching the moon obstruct close to 80 percent of the sun, and block out about 20 percent of the light.

Plenty of glasses were available, but the computer screens offered a much better close-up view of the spectacle. We also had fun interlocking our fingers to project the eclipse on white surfaces.

At around 1:15 p.m. we finally saw the famed “rings of fire.” The moon had passed directly in front of the sun, but with its outer edges still exposed, the rays danced around the moon in golden, ring-like formations. The pinnacle of the eclipse, however, was getting to see dozens of “Baily’s Beads,” forming around the moon. Because of the moon’s jagged surface, deep valleys and high peaks, the un-obscured parts of sun didn’t appear around the moon in perfect rings but rather in beads of light in various of sizes.