Ecipse

Being a keen fan of astronomy and I had been looking forward to this week’s solar eclipse for quite some time. As always with these things I am left with one major question: is the Scottish weather going to play ball? Over the last few months we have had meteor showers, planetary conjunctions and several displays of the Northern Lights which I am reliably informed were spectacular. I have seen pictures to back this up but all I have been able to see in the night’s sky is thick, unrelenting cloud.

The forecast for Friday didn’t look particularly promising. We are pretty much in the middle of Scotland so any split on an East-West basis is something of a gamble but for once we managed to get lucky and sided with a clear skied Fife. For a solar eclipse this is fortunate because whilst a little light cloud can still show the crescented sun many of the odd and wonderful effects of the eclipse are missed. As it was, we had bright sunshine for almost the entire event apart from a short period of light cloud that allowed a friend of mine to take this rather pleasing image:

I wondered whether this was taken with somewhat more professional photographic equipment than I have in my possession but apparently it is taken in “pet portrait mode”. I’m not exactly sure what “pet portrait mode” is and I can only assume that it is a setting that takes random images which may or may not contain a picture of a cat/dog paying absolutely no attention whatsoever to the camera. However, it did rather give me the idea that the sun’s “grin” is actually the Cheshire Cat in celestial form.

The odd thing with an eclipse of the sun is that the most interesting thing about it is not necessarily the sun itself but the strange effects that it plays on the light and the local environment. The light is odd and it is not merely because it reverts to twilight. Shadows differ depending on which angle they are looked at - hard edges in one plane and fuzzy edges on another. Although our eclipse was over 95% complete it doesn’t go dark as such but the dimming of the light would not be far off that experienced by a moon of Jupiter. For the 5 to 10 minutes of the peak it became noticeably cooler with a breeze being felt on what had been a largely still day. Overall it is a slightly unnerving if wondrous experience.

I did set myself up a pinhole camera to observe the eclipse's progression. I had heard a couple of sources suggesting that a kitchen colander could be used as a simple pin-hole camera and I had been rather sceptical about this. Dara Ó Briain had mentioned this on Stargazing Live and somewhat jokingly dismissed it as “what the eclipse will look like – if you are a fly.” I still wanted to give this a go so tried it out with our metal colander. The actual effect is very pleasing indeed as it does create a fly-vision effect but also a rather aesthetically pleasant one:

If solar eclipses are best experienced for their environmental effects lunar eclipses are fantastic for simple observation. I haven’t managed to catch a decent one for a few years now (the last one I observed from start to finish I did whilst listening to Tangerine Dream’s Zeit album – check the LP cover). We are due to have one on 28th September this year although, annoyingly, it does involve staying up in the early hours as it peaks around 03:30 in the morning. As I have the next day off as a local holiday I may well stay up and watch it with or without Krautrock accompaniment – at least if the Scottish weather obliges.