[Duffy]

Hi all,

Thought you might like to see how the partial eclipse on Friday 20th looked like from Northern England, would have posted sooner but I was busy thinking up the thread title .

   

This was roughly at peak eclipse time (09:30 UT), and was taken with a Samsung WB150 camera, through the eye piece of my 25x100 filtered binoculars. The weather was very overcast, so I used a bit of a grab and go set up, rather than my usual gear as this is more laboured.

   

This was taken 30 minutes after peak, and is basically a free hand shot using cloud cover as a natural filter. By this point, the temperature had dropped, all the birds were noisy with confusion, and my wife's pet chickens went back to bed, so I missed my egg for breakfast!.

   

I thought I'd add this plot screen image to show the effect a partial eclipse has on VLF, and your not likely to see this in a magazine. You can see that from 08:30 ish onwards, the red trace at the bottom of the screen (noise line) has dipped as a result of lower sky wave interferance. The rest of the traces have risen, particularly around 09:30, the pink trace (North Dakota) is showing a very strong influence, as it is with the birds, the VLF signals are responding similarly to when the Sun is setting, UV is reduced so they become stronger.

I believe the next partial eclipse in my region is about 11 years off, so if I'm still doing this, it might make a good comparison, might even have a signal from an Earthquake by then (Do Quakes have droughts or something ??)

Duffy;