Near Misses and a Direct Hit

Last week saw Edinburgh’s last significant eclipse until 2093, with 90.6% of the sun obscured, but unlike 90.6% of the population I failed to make my way to a decent hill to watch it. Instead, minutes before it began, I slapped together a pinhole camera from a cardboard box and some foil and ran down to the garden of our tenement block. The problem with that just-in-time approach soon became clear. From the ground, the sun was barely above the roofs of the surrounding buildings, and it dipped below them before the eclipse’s peak; and because I’d used a square box rather than a long cereal box, the image projected inside the pinhole camera was the size of, well, a pinhole. I did much better in 2015, when the coverage was 93.1%. But that was okay. I was happy just to sit and listen to the birds get confused, as the garden and the surrounding streets quietened, the skies dimmed, and the clouds took on their weird steely hue. I took a few photos, but neither my regular camera nor the…