On the 29th of May 2025 there was a partial solar eclipse, I learned it was happening about 40 minutes before it began. I really wanted to see it and rushed to cobble together some kind of way of seeing it.

My initial thought was some kind of darkened glass or reflective filter which would let me see the action directly with my own eyes, the best I could come up with at such short notice was a bunch of reflective Mylar bags used for static sensitive components. While this allowed me to look directly at the sun all I could see was a blurry mess.

Next thought was a classic pin-hole camera. This was as simple as getting a sheet of tin-foil and punching a hole with a pin. This obviously worked brilliantly and great smile spread across my face when I first saw the little circle with a tiny bite taken out of the corner.

I wanted to enlarge the image and take some high-resolution images. I am lucky enough to own a digital microscope which servers both these functions. I jerry-rigged a setup with stuff which came to hand, the eclipse was about 30% of the way through at this point, I took over the lounge table as it was close to a large south facing window. Some helping hands held the pinhole and a nearby scented candle propped the microscope up at an angle to make the projected image appear circular rather than an ellipse.

This worked well but the images had blue streaky lines and were blown-out, it turned out that there was a major light leak through the top of the focusing ring. This was quickly fixed with a wrap of tin-foil. Turns out that this microscope wasn't designed to be used at an angle facing the sun, who'd've thought 😆

After taking a few photos and continuing to be amazed I thought that it would be awesome to make a timelapse, so I hit record on the microscope. After a few minutes I was reminded that planet earth is spinning because the image was slowly wondering off to one side. This meant that I had to keep adjusting the position of the microscope and that I was going to have to do some post-processing to get a nice video. I haven't done that yet.

Solar Power

While watching as the moon took an ever larger bite out of the sun I thought that it should be getting darker. There was no perceivable difference because it was only a partial eclipse and our eyes do an excellent job of automatically adjusting, regardless there must've been less light reaching the earth and therefore solar farms must've been generating less power.

The graph below is from the excellent grid.iamkate.com site. The yellow line shows the total solar generation across the UK, and clearly shows production drops at the time of the eclipse.