"At the back of us were great blue spaces in the clouds. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red & black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, & very beautiful, so delicately tinted. Nothing could be seen through the cloud. The 24 seconds were passing." Virginia Woolf, 'The Sun and the Fish', 1928
Early on the morning of 29 June 1927, the shadow of the Moon kissed the north of Wales and crossed the north of England. That day saw a total solar eclipse, the first in mainland Britain for over 200 years. The track of totality started at dawn to the southwest of Ireland, passed over the Lleyn Peninsula and Eryri (Snowdonia) in north Wales, before touching the English coast at Southport at 06:24 in the morning local time. Blackpool, Blackburn and Preston in Lancashire, Richmond and Middlesbrough in Yorkshire and Darlington in County Durham all saw total eclipses, as did parts of Liverpool and Durham. The track of totality left the English coast near Hartlepool and continued across the North Sea to Scandinavia and northern Russia. The whole of Britain saw at least a 90 per cent partial eclipse.
From the UK, it was a very short eclipse. Southport, on the centreline of totality, saw only 23 seconds of totality, Wales a second less, the east coast a second more. Yet, despite the short duration and the early time, a lot of people travelled to see it. Resorts such as Southport in Merseyside laid on "AllNight Festivities, including a special Open-Air Band Concert in the Municipal Gardens on June 29th at 3:30am". The newspapers estimated that a quarter of a million people were in the resort to see the eclipse.
British weather strikes
Bu hikaye BBC Sky at Night Magazine dergisinin June 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye BBC Sky at Night Magazine dergisinin June 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
Unearthing galaxies in the archives
Comparing old Hubble data to today is revealing distant active galaxies
Voyager 1 is back online and exploring the unknown
An interstellar rescue brings the venerable spacecraft back after months out of action
When Haydn met the Herschels
Jonathan Powell on how the astronomer siblings inspired the famous composer
A quicker way to colourise your narrowband frames
Create a bicolour image in Siril using data from just two narrowband filters
Manhattanhenge
New York's urban island of Manhattan, with its gridiron street layout, sees summer Suns set neatly between skyscrapers. Jamie Carter explains the phenomenon
A very British eclipse
In 1927, Britain experienced its first total solar eclipse since 1724. Mike Frost looks at how, like 8 April 2024's US spectacle, eclipse fever swept the nation
The spirit of the eclipse
Eclipse chaser Yvette Cook reports on what it was like in the path of totality in Texas during 8 April's Great American Eclipse
Cosmic rays
In part two of our series, Govert Schilling looks at cosmic rays, the high-energy particles that bombard Earth from space
Stones of the SOLSTICE
Jamie Carter explores 12 ancient stones, tombs and temples across the world that align with the Sun at the solstice
Surfing spacetime with LISA
A new era of gravitational wave astronomy is on its way as the ambitious upcoming LISA space mission joins a host of huge detectors on Earth. Charlie Hoy explains