please empty your brain below

For the 1999 eclipse I went to Cornwall, it did turn an eerie dark under the clouds, which I would not have noticed if I had stayed in London.
If you can get to an area of totality it is well worth the effort.
Yay, thanks DG! I've been really excited about this for ages, but it's been feeling like hardly anyone else was interested and hardly any newspapers have even mentioned it.

Anyway, we booked our holiday a while ago, so we'll be jetting off to the Faroe Islands in a few weeks' time. So excited!
The one thing I remember about the 1999 eclipse was that it got sufficiently dim for the birds to start their dawn chorus again.

(Oh, and by the way, it's just Shetland, not the Shetlands)
Thanks for the heads-up though! Like Karen, I've found the lack of coverage elsewhere a little odd - I've had it in my diary for ages!
Thanks DG. I sort of knew about, but was mainly in the dark about it.
Weirdly it's the same day as the Equinox (22:45 20-Mar-2015). So you could go to Stonehenge, watch the sunrise on equinox day, then watch the eclipse.
Once again, as with yesterday's post, this is the definitive article on the subject.
Talking of Equinox: according to the Wikipedia article, the eclipse path will end at the North Pole, so the once-a-year sunrise at the North Pole will be eclipsed. I'm not sure how accurate that is, though.
I was also in Cornwall in 1999. It was cloudy, but the clouds parted for us just enough at just the right moment.

There was also the annular eclipse in October 2005, but it was "only" around 60% in most of the UK.

Much rarer are transits of Venus - 2004 and 2012 and then nothing until 2117.

Good luck to those who actually managed to book something on the Faroes or in Svalbard. Neither are particularly easy to get to or from, but I'm sure the locals are making hay while the Sun, er, doesn't shine.
Anyone after a modestly priced pair of filtered glasses could pick up the new issue of The Sky at Night magazine which comes with a pair taped to the front. Although I too still have my 1999 pair which I'm sure ended up on sale in WH Smiths around the lead-up to the eclipse.

I suspect that in the week or so leading up to it, the media will get heavily behind it. Stargazing Live on BBBC2 has been shifted back a couple of months to coincide with it.
So that's my plans for my 50th sorted in 2026 - thanks DG : )
Unfortunately the experience of a 90% eclipse is not even close to a total one.

You can safely remove the google at 100%, but even at 99% the sun is just too bright.
We looked at the track of the 1999 eclipse and planned our family holiday so we'd be somewhere on it on eclipse day. We chose Salzburg, and watched it all from a hill in the town -- where, about half a mile away, there was an outdoor performance of Don Giovanni, timed so that the hell scene coincided with totality. A fabulous experience.
And the torrential rain didn't start until about an hour after the eclipse.
We saw the 1999 eclipse, though not totality, from the Isle of Wight. Fortunately there was just enough cloud cover to make it safe to look, but not enough to block the view.

My sister and brother in law had gone to Cornwall, they just saw it get dark! Astronomy from the UK is so hit and miss.
I delierately watched out for the 1999 eclipse in London (Surrey) and I was disappointed. Admittedly I wasn't looking directly at the sun, rather the effect of how the daylight changed. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but from what I remember, I don't think it made much difference.
I vaguely seem to think that the day was cloudy at the time, so perhaps that made the light level change less effective.

I'll try and look out for the one this year, even though it will probably be even less effective than the 1999 one.
I was in Cornwall ( as you'd expect !) in 1999. Although it was cloudy it did get dark and the birds started their dawn chorus again. It was quite an experience. Thanks DG for all the info on the next one.
I was in Exeter in 1999 and, like a few others, I vividly recall the sound of the birds. It got fairly dark, but nowhere near as dark as it did in the London area on 6th August 1981.

Nobody who experienced that will ever forget it.
I too was in Cornwall, and also remember the birdsong. What I also remember was the very oppresive realisation that there were seventy three and a half million million million tonnes looming above us.

My 18-month old baby was there. If he is spared, he could go back when he's 92 to see the next one.

@Karen
According to this site the sun takes about five days to emerge above the horizon at the North Pole; the equinox being the third of those five days, when the cenmtre of the sun clears the horizon. The NASA site also gives the edge of the path of totality reaching only to just over 89 degrees north. The North Pole gets a 98.83% obscuration with the duration of partial eclipse a little less than two hours.
For a partial eclipse, projecting the sun’s rays through binoculars on to a piece of card produces a surprisingly clear image. You can also astound people who are not aware there’s a partial eclipse going on!
I watched 99 on TV and thinking it looked so cloudy. Further north in Sockport it was clearer. It was similar to dusk or late afternoon so felt strange but still very light.
The 99 eclipse has been eagerly anticipated for years, if not decades. And then the day arrived overcast. Still, I remember the streetlights coming on in Falmouth.
Ah yes, Cornwall 1999. The day before was bright and clear but the clouds rolled in on the 11th.
I got to Shanghai in 2009 and yes the day before was clear but eclipse day was overcast.
I've yet to experience a cloudless total eclipse and time is running out!

I couldn't believe my luck in 1999: we picked the one spot in western Europe that was absolutely clear of clouds, Grandvilliers, just north of Paris. It was an experience that I will dare to describe by the word "awesome".

And, incidentally, last night a tiny crescent moon (with the old moon in its arms), Venus, and Mars were all together in the clear evening sky over St Andrews, with Jupiter on the other side of the sky.
Place a bucket of water in the garden and look at the eclipse's reflection on the surface. This worked well in 1999.










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