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Eclipse Plus
Aug. 12th, 2026 10:33 pmWe've had so much going on with my mother that I was completely unaware the eclipse was imminent until Sunday afternoon - far too late to order eclipse viewing glasses.
So I spent part of this afternoon knocking up a pinhole projector from a couple of sheets of cardboard (courtesy of last night's pizza). I also tried to produce a boxed one (box liberated from the last few cans of beer at its bottom), but with less success.
It's been our hottest day of the year (32C), but was starting to cool to more reasonable temperatures as my sister and I settled down in her garden, which is handily west-facing. And just as it ticked around to 18:05, scheduled start of the eclipse here in Durham, the sun disappeared behind a cloud.
*headdesk*
Fortunately it reappeared after about 10 minutes and settled into a pattern of alternating about ten minutes obscured, and 10 minutes in the clear. It was annoying not to be able to look at it directly, but the pinhole projector worked rather well, and I even got the box one working, though using it required holding either your head or one or both arms at awkward angles.
It was a very pleasant couple of hours, though less reaction from the local birdlife than I expected - we had a large number of gulls milling about about a quarter of an hour in, but no roosting - and we would have known if that was happening as we have a couple of hundred starlings habitually roosting in the tree two doors up, and about fifty in the tree two doors down.
Once we'd gotten to maximum, I settled back just to enjoy the light and not concentrate so much on the solar disk, and after a few minutes started reading on my phone about what other people were seeing across Europe, then about twenty minutes past maximum I glanced up, and had to look again and call for my sister to look, because there was a segment of vertical rainbow peaking through the clouds. It was only a small segment*, but I'm pretty sure I was looking at enough to have seen the arc if it had been a conventional rainbow.
So Eclipse Plus - two optical phenomena at the same time!
And it was a good job I looked up when I did, because it only lasted a couple of minutes.
* About the size of the first joint of my thumb at arms length, about 15 degrees behind the sun's position in the sky, and aligned with red towards the sun, violet away - the red was very intense, the blue-indigo-violet very pale.
