The Judge RANTS!
Date: 13/08/26
Sun: Blocked
There was all that fuss about the near-total solar eclipse yesterday and - as I suspected it would be my last chance to see one at first hand - I decided that I would make an effort.
I had seen one before, in (I think) 1999, which happened late in the morning when I was in work, and I remember looking at it by the reflection off a car roof in the car park. This one, however, was going to be in the early evening, with it starting shortly after 1800 hrs and reaching its maximum of 92% about an hour later.
Realising that the sun would have gone down over the houses across the road by that time, I knew that I had to find a better vantage point facing west. So it was that, shortly before six last night, I made my way up Pool Road, turned right through a gap in the fence and made my way up to Offa's Dyke. It being obvious that the bushes on top of the earthwork would partly obscure the view, I stayed on the ditch side (as seen in the third picture here), and plonked myself down on the parched grass with my camera and the special glasses which my cousin Paul had been handing out at the Wednesday social earlier in the day. These didn't fit particularly comfortably over my own specs (a problem which has plagued me before, as this report illustrates), but I wasn't going to run the risk of further damaging my dodgy eyesight, so needs must. One other problem with this was that I couldn't see what I was aiming my elderly BenQ digital camera at without peeking under the special glasses, so I could have been shooting the nearby electricity pylon for all I could tell.
As the hour wore on, I was joined by other observers of a variety of ages, until there were about twenty or so of us in all.
It was uncomfortably hot, as it had been all day, and there was very little wind to ameliorate the conditions. I wondered whether I would end up as scorched as the grass upon which I was sitting rather less than comfortably.
Finally, there was A Sign, as the lower right quadrant of the sun started to be blotted out by Luna her very self. Gradually, the shadow crept across from the lower left and the temperature started to reduce slightly as a consequence.
1900 hrs arrived, by which time the image of the sun through the specs resembled a rather slacked-jawed PacMan, and we were all eagerly awaiting for the treat...
...at which point, a large dark cloud came over and blotted the sun out altogether. All that we got from that point on were shafts of faint light through the cloud, and the magic was lost.
Few of my photographs came out in any useful form, except for this one as the land darkened:
After a few minutes, I picked myself up off the ground, trudged back down the field and on to the road and walked grumpily home through the semi-twilight.
Even the cosmos seems to be conspiring against me these days...
