Ooh, gotcha with the title! Yes, it’s Friday and that often means a Sunrise, Sunset post. It does today, too, but with a little extra.

There was a near-total eclipse visible in parts of the world today. Supposedly the UK was one place to see this, but it is a solidly London day of total cloud cover, so bad luck, most of us in the capital didn’t see anything. This does bring me back to nearly three years ago, though, when I stood on a ridge in Australia and watched a partial eclipse.

The eclipse was happening just after sunrise, so my Byron Bay hosts and I walked up the hill behind their house to a bit of national parkland. We sat on rocks amid the scrub brush and watched the sun rise over the hills and sea beyond us. I am certainly no morning person, but I make exceptions for incidents of natural beauty and/or rarity. This was worth the early wake-up call.

Sunrise over Arakwal National Park

Byron Bay is the easternmost town in Australia, so that makes it first to see the sun every morning

After the sunrise, we waited a bit longer for it to disappear again. The others were using emergency blankets to look through, so they could look at the sun and see the eclipse. I was recovering from shingles of the eye and decided I therefore had enough eyesight troubles and didn’t need to tempt the gods by looking at the sun, so I made a jankity little pinhole camera thing (really I tried to line up two pieces of paper correctly every time I wanted to take a look). It wasn’t the same, but it was still cool to see the little circle of light get slowly edged out by the shadow of the moon.

Waiting for the eclipse

If you saw the eclipse today, congrats! How did it look? Did you use a pinhole camera or did you risk your eyeballs and look straight on?