There had been so much hype around the solar eclipse this week that, naturally, I’d left it far too late to order any of the special eclipse glasses.
Fortunately, Sara invited Bridget and me over to their flat to watch it together. And, of course, if you’re going to have an eclipse gathering, you need appropriately themed food.
Sara suggested Pizza! Why? Because pizzas are round like the moon. Bridget took the theme one step further and bought pepperoni pizzas because the pepperoni reminded her of craters on the moon’s surface. You have to admire the attention to detail!
We might not have had eclipse glasses, but we were prepared.
Apparently, one of the recommended ways to watch an eclipse safely without glasses is to use a colander to project lots of tiny images of the sun onto a surface. So, naturally, we had two colanders on standby.
We’d also read about making a pinhole camera, so we made one of those too.
Now all we needed was one fairly important ingredient. The sun.
There were a couple of brief moments when it managed to break through the cloud cover, and we rushed with our colanders to experiment. I think what we wanted to see may have been slightly more impressive than what we actually saw. There was definitely a fair amount of imagination involved!
We kept tracking the progress of the eclipse on an app while simultaneously watching the BBC coverage, hoping that the clouds might miraculously part at just the right moment.
Alas, this is Britain. As the eclipse approached its optimum point, the clouds got thicker and thicker until one enormous black cloud positioned itself directly in front of the sun. And that was that. Our eclipse experience was, quite literally, eclipsed by a cloud.
After all the anticipation, the pizzas, two colanders and our homemade pinhole camera, it was all a bit of a damp squib.
Will, meanwhile, was watching from Hampstead Heath and sent us an amazing photograph of the eclipse, which I presume he managed to take through his eclipse glasses. So at least somebody in the family actually saw it! Lucky boy.
My friend Viv went considerably further in her pursuit of the eclipse — she was in Iceland, where she experienced the total solar eclipse. I suspect her experience and photographs might be slightly more dramatic than ours.
All of this reminded me of the last big eclipse in 1999. Will was only one year old then, and I remember our neighbour watching it reflected in a bucket of water.
Twenty-seven years later, technology may have moved on considerably, but there we were…Standing with two colanders trying to get the images to focus on the wall.
Sometimes the old ways are the best. Although perhaps next time I’ll remember to order the glasses.
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