We watched the eclipse!

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Yesterday evening there was a partial solar eclipse visible from the UK, the first since 2017 and the last until 2090. I missed the total eclipse in 1999 as I had moved to the US, and I probably won’t be here to see the 2090 one! The media were full of warnings against looking directly at the sun due to the likelihood of eye damage. You could get special ‘solar specs’ although apparently supplies of these ran out… there were also various suggestions for easy and accessible ways to watch. First was a simple ‘pinhole camera’ approach – basically just make a tiny hole in a piece of card, and standing with your back to the sun focus the image onto another card (or some other sort of screen – a plain T shirt also worked!) Second was to make an actual pinhole camera from an empty cereal box, with a little viewing window cut out, a pinhole in a piece if kitchen foil and a little screen of plain white paper for the image. And third was to use a kitchen colander. We decided to try them all, and rather to my surprise they all worked well! The colander was the favourite because it produced an image through each hole. Big One came home early to watch, and Antonio just managed to finish the last slide of his online presentation and run outside in time to see the eclipse peak! It happens quite fast, because although the moon takes about an hour to fully pass in front of the sun, the sun is so bright that until the majority of the light is blocked you don’t really see too much difference, and the period when it was really noticeable only lasted about ten minutes. Nevertheless we had a lot of fun watching the sun become a crescent, and after we had all tried the three different methods and taken photos etc, then we tried projecting the image onto different things – Antonio’s white T-shirt, Paola’s hands, the leaves of nearby plants… And then it was over and back to the usual evening activities. Have you seen an eclipse? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gdxyjnz3do All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2026.