Eclipse over Edinburgh

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This morning the Faroe Islands got to experience a total solar eclipse. (Well, they did in theory. In practice it was cloudy and they saw nothing.) Here in Scotland, we got around 93% of said eclipse. 

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When we woke up we were happy to be greeted by a sunny first day of spring. After testing our hard-won eclipse glasses out the kitchen window, we packed up some coffee and a blanket and headed out to Inverleith Park, where there’s a hill with a duckpond and a view of Edinburgh’s skyline.

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It proved a popular viewing point. Through the glasses we watched the first half of the eclipse (the whole thing lasted for around two hours). Our attempts at photography at this point mostly yielded big blobs of light, as in the above photo.

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Clouds started rolling in as the eclipse reached its most complete point. This proved fortuitous, as suddenly the sun started showing up in our photographs.

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The clouds also allowed for some naked-eye viewing of the eclipse. Unfortunately most of the people around us didn’t have eclipse glasses. They were frustratingly difficult to find in Edinburgh this week (Scott managed to finally snag some yesterday after driving to 3 different Morrisons). We gave our one extra pair to an extremely grateful French tourist.

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A little past the midpoint of the eclipse, the cloud cover became thicker, and the gathered crowd started to dissipate. We snapped a few more photos and headed to work, pleased with this interesting start to our Friday.

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5 thoughts on “Eclipse over Edinburgh”

  1. Fantastic photos. I’m totally impressed your camera captured it so well – which one did you use?

    It went eerily dark around here at the appointed time but my flat is in precisely the wrong position for looking at the sun at that hour. Which was lucky, I suppose, not being equipped with the proper eyewear…

  2. I was really sad to miss the eclipse. I ended up stuck in the US longer than I expected and so I didn’t make it back in time, but those photos are fantastic!

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