Foreign Perspectives

There’s a solar eclipse coming up this Friday morning though I’ll not be at this one or at least not at totality basically because the path is crossing a whole bunch of places that are pretty difficult and/or expensive to get to.

At our last one in Turkey in 2006 the plan was for a group of those at that one to organise a trip to see this one in Novosibirsk in Siberia but it proved to be a touch too complex to organise both travel and accommodation to such a relatively isolated spot. The most viable way seemed to be by means of the Trans-Siberian Express but I suspect that the expense of that proved to be a touch high to swing it with the rest of the family for many people.

Still, at least we’ll see a partial eclipse on Friday morning. For most of Europe that’s between about 9.30am to 11am (8.30am to 10am in the UK/Ireland) when you’ll see the sun going dark for the couple of hours as the moon passes across it.

Don’t forget that you can’t look directly at the sun for more than a very short time with your eyes and not at all with binoculars, telescopes or similar. It’s OK to view it via the screen on cameras though but don’t point the camera towards the sun too long or you’ll be needing a new one as it’ll burn out various components with the heat.

You’ll find lots more info on this on NASA’s solar eclipse site.