On Thursday of last week we had a partial solar eclipse as viewed in the UK. The timings for Norwich were for first contact at about 10.11, maximum coverage (around 33%) at 11.17 and last contact at 12.27. All times BST. I decided to set up my Celestron NexStar 102SLT in good time for the beginning of the eclipse and I am glad I did because cloud began to increase after 10am and by about 10.45 we lost all visibility. I decided to project the sun's image onto a screen using a 25mm eyepiece. Initially I didn't include the star diagonal which was a mistake because I couldn't rack the focus far out enough to get a clear image. Once I used the star diagonal everything was fine. I took this image at 10.31 BST:-
This was taken with a Samsung Galaxy A21s phone camera. The 'nibble' out of the sun's image by the moon can clearly be seen. I decided to do a bit more by videoing the image with my phone and putting it live on Facebook. The resultant video can be seen here.
Elsewhere on the earth this was an annular eclipse - the further distance of the moon from the earth meant that its face didn't cover the entirety of sun. The annular eclipse began in northern Canada, moved over the north pole and ended in the far east of Russia.
All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2021
