Partial Eclipse of My Heart!

Gazing in awe at the majesty of the universe (well, one of us is)

Eclipse '26 has been and gone. And how magical it was to witness with my own (protected) eyes.

I took almost 40 pictures - through my special phone filter - during the event but none captured the majesty of what I was actually seeing.

Earlier in the day, I had decreed the best place to watch this celestial phenomenon was the bathroom on the top floor, as - via its louvre window - you can see the sun setting almost directly in front of our house.

It was also like a prison camp sweatbox in there. It's been insanely hot all day (well over 30°C) and then with the sun shining directly into that small room it was baking.

The things I'll do for science!

Initially the disc of sun was being eaten away in the lower, right-hand corner (four o'clock on a clockface), but as more disappeared the sun began to resemble Pac-Man as the bright daylight turned a strange, ethereal grey (rather confusing little Alice).

Alice really didn't understand what was going on and why we were crowded into the bathroom

Then as it reached maximum (partial) eclipse the visible sun had shrunk to resemble a banana and then just a sliver, a tear in space like an inverted smile - tantalisingly close to a total eclipse, but that's not to be for us until the end of the century.

Probably my best picture: when I was looking at a thin sliver of sun, this was what my phone captured

While I had initially been moved almost to tears by this rare astronomical event, Rachel - who was famously underwhelmed by Stonehenge, calling it "rather small" - was less impressed. 

But, to be fair, the whole deal with "outer space" isn't really her thing. She's more about the here-and-now, and tackling immediate problems on the ground. She's the practical one, I'm the dreamer with his head-in-the-clouds.

As I've already said, my efforts to capture the historic astral moment were pretty dismal, but I will forever have the sight of the spectacular partial eclipse burned into my memory (rather than my retinas, thank the gods for protective glasses).

The best pictures were on the BBC's live coverage

We All Remember How Day of The Triffids Starts, Right?

The sun, earlier this week, through my new solar filter for my phone

Unless you've been living under a rock, it can't have escaped your attention that we're on track for a dramatic solar eclipse this evening.

Where we are the sun should be just over 90 per cent covered for the 30 minutes from after 7pm.

But that's not all that's going on in the heavens this evening: in a once-in-a-lifetime, never heard of in recorded history, the eclipse is happening on the same night as the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower.

Complementing that - although totally unconnected - is the planetary alignment of Mars, Saturn, Mercury, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune across the horizon.

For those in the States:

The amateur space nut in me is very excited to - hopefully - see the eclipse in particular, as the next comparable event isn't due until 2090... and I'm not sure if I'll be around for that. 

I even invested in some certified protective eclipse glasses for Rachel and I, which came packaged with filters to hold over the camera lens on our phones so we can safely take pictures as well.

However, I've also read and watched enough cosmic and apocalyptic horror to know that this is exactly the time the Great Old Ones are likely to arise, zombies will crawl out of their graves, or triffids will escape confinement and start turning us all into mulch.

Have fun, be safe, be sensible... and listen out for chants of:

"Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"