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New! This page now has a graph of light levels. But to start, here's a snatch of an email conversation:
R.L. wrote:
> I used Mark Annand's technique of using
> one half of a pair of binoculars to project
> the image of the eclipse onto a white card.
Yes, I set fire to my binoculars too.
Not viewing the eclipse though, but a few days before, practising when the sun was out. As it was on the morning of the eclipse until nine ... and after twelve ...
Even when the clouds gathered I had an inkling that the weather wouldn't affect the impact of the spectacle though. We went down to Plymouth on the morning of the eclipse and were surprised to find the M5 very quiet indeed. Now I know we have television - the haunted fishtank itself - and all the paraphernalia of modern technology, but I was still taken aback at the emptiness of the roads. The railway couldn't be said to be in the same state, and we were aboard a Pathfinder charter train full of sleepy people from Cree-wee. The train cleared the dawn by Taunton to run West through a magical world of early morning mists, sun, and tousled countryside: the mists particularly would have been appreciated far less if we had been on the roads.
Plymouth Hoe has a reasonable horizon to the north west and a wide view across the harbour and out to sea over the breakwater: we decided to stay with the crowds gathering there, as the weather showed every intention of getting dirty. Plan 'b' had been to take a train out of town and lurk on a hilltop above Gunnislake surrounded by spoil heaps upon which no life will grow ...
Now there must be a hierarchy of desirable weather for eclipses: seeing the sun is engrossing, and obcuration of the whole event by thick fog must cause the most dismay: but I'm wondering if the domination of the sky by the bizarre sight of the eclipsed sun in some ways detracts from the experience. Certainly it's worth hoping for a clear atmosphere with a complex and preferably not total cloud cover, and this is what we had at Plymouth ...
So the clouds gathered: the P.A. kindly announced the times of first contact and later gave the sort of safety information that caused great merriment - several people had been staring dutifully at the slowly darkening sky through their eclipse glasses as though they were 'x-ray specs'. The commentator also explained the workings of the outdoor cinema, that it produced an image only in night time conditions and we should not expect to see anything until the eclipse was well and truly underway, and also that they needed to feed it so much power that they could only run half the PA system (consequently we could hear him well, and the various muted band-noises had a suitably tribal appeal). Absolutely nothing happened for a great while, but the gathering crush of people held a mood of co-operative anticipation, which makes a change, and it seemed to be at least half an hour into the eclipse before my camera's light meter began registering a slow drop in the light level. This turned out to be due to varying cloud cover as it happily bobbed up again and then began another slow descent ...
Totality was due at around eleven thirteen: and at eleven there was beginning the impression that something should have happened by now. Five minutes later, things were gloomy, there was the same uneasy change in light level that one gets beneath a summer thunderstorm when there is thickening in the clouds above one's head. The scene beyond the hoe was becoming drab and colourless, the last small boats making their way out to sea by motor while one small Drascombe lugger still sailed and tacked in the slight breeze on an opposite shore. A chill gathered.
Now I find I need a month of eclipses to absorb what happened next: something that had begun with similarities to a simple dimming of the light now diverged, unstuck, and dropped into the realm of the extraordinary. Someone, somewhere, could do worse than to publish a plot of light levels as we entered that shadow, so much more unsettling when encountered by day than in the ordinary gentle evening course of events. At once the light began falling away ever more rapidly: this was shortly followed by the sensation of movement strong enough to cause a brief nausea: and a paradoxical increasing colour in the sky - the clouds were no longer grey but an subtle inky grey black, and highlights of dusky red and orange, and a more unsettling dark was stealing rapidly from the western horizon, the appearance of which changed in seconds from the opacity that lies beneath a great thunderstorm to something for a moment far more sinister: before the realisation came that this was merely the shadow of a great body passing us far out in space and we were not to be crushed.
This new inkiness seeped rapidly into the clouds, and this deep shadow now spread across to the east in seconds - the sky covered - both dark but astonishingly and very subtly alive as the illumination changed to a shifting palatte of night time sky, dusky, silvery corona light, and haze-reddened seepage from the lit world that was abruptly forty and more miles away. This last was poignant, as a chance window of visibility out to sea still showed a distant glimpse of a normal world very many miles distant: an unattainable world of sea, falling rain, clear skies and billowing white pillow clouds, but seen as though through the wrong end of a telescope, and giving a most horrible rendering of the view of paradise from a medæval hell: a resonance to the phrase 'through a glass darkly'. The great darkness held sway for those two minutes, the sky full of subtle elisions of blackness, and then rolled on, the eastern horizon now held the fleeing ravens-wing dark which lifted from the west, leaving the impression that an immense supernatural bird had passed, covering our skies with a single beat of its great wing, the light lifting from the horizon a subtle yellow orange at first, before the rapidly increasing illumination from the daytime grey skies reasserted itself.
As for our world: it adapted as well as it could. Street lights leapt into life, as did the navigation buoys in the harbour and the lighthouse far out to sea. As the final dark rolled in from the west, the gathering collectively caught its breath, and then a wave of thousands of insignificant camera flashes twinkled across hillsides near and far in an attempt to catch a still image of a phenomenon whose foundation was change. The final seconds of the approach finally dropped the light levels enough for the projection cinema to carry an image of the start of totality to us: those who watched for any time were driven partly by the need to escape the sight of that sky - the day, with its warmth and summer air seemingly gone for good. The returning light drew a collective gasp of wonder, relief and applause.
But another hour, and the warmth had returned, and at twelve thirty, on an obligatory boat round the harbour, the skies, now so different with the light back in the world, finally parted to reveal the sun's disk with the most minute nail-paring chewed from one side of it ...
Later we took the railway to Gunnislake - an experience in itself - and overheard tales of the eclipse encountered in deep countryside: the silence as the birds roosted: a field of cows lying down as if by a signal, insects, bees, sheltering instantly beneath the flowers that moments before had fed them, beneath that same still yet-flying-shadow that had swept across the land and fled out over the sea. It may be running there still.
Time passes, and the moon's orbit takes her past the sun, but no eclipse, with its terrors, underlying or real. Many people's perceptions of the skies will have been changed by the event though, some who were beneath that shadow, rain or shine, can now see hints of the eclipsed sky in the everyday world: subtle hints in ordinary gathering rainclouds, though never as dark, seldom with that sensation of gathering movement as when our moon swung past us this August.
One Angus Gregson responded to my plea for a plot of light levels during the eclipse. He was beneath cloudy skies too, but on Carn Brea, on the Penwith peninsula, inland of Sennen Cove. He happened to have a datalogger, and here's a graph of his figures.
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All before you, in this world, is smoke and shadows.
