Remember 11 August 1999? Five years ago today, it was also Wednesday, it was also cloudy (though there was no rain), but many more people were paying attention to the skies that day. It was the day the sun went in for a moment as it was eclipsed by the moon.
Of all of England, only the SW would have been able to see totality of the eclipse, but most of Cornwall was under cloud. Scilly was quite lucky and a couple of small gaps in the cloud appeared during the one-minute-and-forty-six-second event at 11:10:28.
Title image: You can see Bailey’s Beads, bright dots of light, around the disc of the moon. The faint glow around the disc is the Sun’s corona, which can only be seen during an eclipse or with specialist equipment.
The next total eclipse to occur will be over the Pacific and central America. It will be on 8 April 2005. Total eclipses happen somewhere in the World once or twice every two years. There are almost always two partial eclipses each year on the Earth.
I took this image today using the solar filters from the glasses we were given five years ago:
There’s not a lot of activity on the surface of the sun at the moment - a quite large sun spot just below the centre of the image, Sunspot #649, and a smaller one just above the centre of the image inline with #649, Sunspot #657.
References: Steve Bell “RGO Guide to the 1999 Eclipse of the Sun” (1997) Patrick Moore “Atlas of the Universe” (1998, Philips)