The eclipse: how was it for you?

Did you see much? If you live in South Wales the answer is you saw everything, because skies here were completely clear throughout the two hours it took for the Moon to pass across the face of the Sun. If you live in the Home Counties, where a third of Britain's population lives, you were, for once, rather less successful. It isn't very often the skies of South Wales afford the best opportunity in the UK for making astronomical observations, but such was the case today.


From my garden I was able to observe the strange change in light quality that occurs during an eclipse, and note how the tiny holes in my bedroom curtains cast beautiful little crescent-shaped images all across our bed. The same phenomenon could be observed out in the garden as eclipsed sunlight filtered through the foliage.


But any partial eclipse is a disappointment compared to a total solar eclipse, two of which I have been privileged to witness in my life, one on the slopes of Mauna Kea in Hawaii in 1991 and again in 1994, high in the Chilean Andes. Only then can the magical corona be seen, the glowing atmosphere of the Sun which extends out many millions of miles from its surface. If you're really lucky, as I was in Hawaii, you may also see solar prominences, brilliant smudges of crimson on the Sun's rim, marking huge plumes of incandescent gas streaming out from the sun. If you are less fortunate, as we were in Cornwall in 1999,  heavy, rain-filled cloud can obscure the sun completely and all you experience is it going dark in the middle of the day, which is pretty amazing in its own way but not exactly what you went there for. And I understand that is regrettably what happened in the Faeroes this morning where they saw... bugger all. Better luck next time all you eclipse chasers. It's in South-East Asia next year, so you should have a much better chance there.