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The Solar Eclipse on 20th March 2015

Our experience of the eclipse in Bletchley, Milton Keynes


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The European Solar Eclipse on 20th March 2015 in Bletchley

Hello Everybody!


We hope you had good weather for the Solar Eclipse on Friday morning. Here in Bletchley we were really lucky: at about 9am the clouds started to thin out and we had a good view of the most dramatic part of the eclipse with about 88% occultation.

We had put up all our viewing equipment in the driveway, so that our neighbours and passers-by could have a look too. We even had one pair of our coveted Solar Specs left (which was slightly creased, so we couldn’t sell it ;-)).

We started setting up at about 8:50am when the first spots of blue sky appeared overhead and were just ready to start observing when the sun came through. Of course we missed first contact, but we were able to see most of the show.

After a short while people started to show up, stop, and came over to have a look through the telescope, into the  Solar Projector, and through the Solar Specs. I even had made an improvised pinhole camera and a projector using our Small Galileo Telescope. The colander was ready, too.

We had lots of fun trying them all out and everybody was impressed by the Solar Projector and the projecting Small Galileo Telescope.

The star of the show was of course my old Vixen 5” Newton reflector, which was fitted with a nice 2” glass filter. This filter gives the sun a really neat orange tinge and it looked very impressive. Even when thin clouds obscured the sun and the other devices didn’t show anything, you could still see the eclipse through the Vixen.

Between around 9:20 and 9:30 the light became quite eerie, a bit like when a thunderstorm approaches. It was a great experience!

Thanks to all who turned up and shared it with us! The next one is in 2026, it will have over 90% occultation in the UK,  and we are already looking forward to it. Just make sure you remember where you put your Solar Specs, or get new ones in time!


Here are some photos I took during the eclipse:

 

This is a comparison between a simple pinhole camera (on the left) and the projection box with our Small Galileo Telescope (on the right).

The image in the pinhole box is so small (about 3mm) that you can hardly see it. The telescope projection on the other hand magnifies the image of the sun to a size that is very comfortable for viewing (about 1”).

The best method for indirect viewing of the eclipse was clearly our Solar Projector. It has a very clear picture and two choices of magnification so that the picture of the sun has either 2” or 3” diameter.

The picture even shows sunspots... today there was only one and it was covered by the moon about three quarters of an hour into the eclipse. On Wednesday when I checked the equipment, there were two large ones and a small group of fainter ones.

... and finally some “colander-art”!

These are some shots I took with our Panasonic digital camera at 300mm equivalent focal length and one of our Small Solar Filter Films fitted to the lens.