Report - 2025-03-29

Rob's Eclipse Viewing Report - 29th March 2025

This eclipse kind of caught me by surprise. I knew about it, but had forgotten, and it wasn’t until member Pete asked what plans I had for the eclipse that Pete and I decided to head for Hackpen Hill. Of course we could have observed this from our own back gardens. But the idea of going somewhere like Hackpen was to see if we could captivate the interest of the general public. Plus, the added bonus of it occurring on a weekend.

Decided to get there for 9 am, which meant no sleep in for me! But having that hour before first contact was useful – gave us time to tweak and sort out any equipment woes, of which I had a few!

As early as a week before I was keeping an eye on the weather forecast, which at that stage look 50/50 at best. But as the week went on, the forecast improved and by Saturday morning skies were perfectly clear.

I meet up with Pete at Hackpen and promptly set about setting everything up. I was going to use the same equipment I had used almost a year ago in Texas for the total out there. This consisted my Pentax DSLR, with 300mm zoom, and a Skywatcher 400mm Travel Scope refractor, both fitted with home made Baader solar filter film.

Pete had also brought along an interesting selection of solar equipment, including his amazing Ha scope. When the pesky clouds ( oh I forgot to mention, clouds did roll in a little during the two hours ) allowed, views of the solar disk in Ha are awesome. Some solar flares were easily visible. Pete also used a refractor fitted with a Herschel Wedge, amazing bit of kit.

First contact was duly noted at about 10 after 10. I snapped away with the DSLR and took a few short videos using a monochrome imager fitted to the Skywatcher. With the imager I also used a Ha imaging filter. This type of filter is not really designed for this sort of work. But experience has shown that used in conjunction with a mono imager, solar detail is enhanced quite a fair degree.

The eclipse progressed. Some thin cloud did roll in, which meant there were many adjustments to imager gain required.

We were both surprised at the absence of the general public, who I thought would have heard all about this from the news and been in attendance. Sadly, only a few dog walkers took any interest at all, although the assumed we were bird watchers! However, once they had gotten a view of our nearest star, a view they never knew could be possible, I think we left them blown away!

So over the next couple of hours, Pete and I took photos and admired the views ( of the Sun of course ! ). We also chatted about our gardens and drank coffee from my Thermos.

The coffee and chilly breeze led to us both fairly urgently requiring the loo! So as soon as the dark disk of the Moon had departed the Sun, we packed away and made haste!

A very good mornings work and, for a change, the British weather got the memo!

Rob Slack