VIEW OF THE ANNULUS.
Our Stornoway (Hebrides) Correspondent says the sun was obscured there under perfect conditions. The eclipse began about 8.40 a.m., and at the annular phase, just before ten o’clock, all that remained round the moon was a beautiful ring of light, less in width than one-twentieth of the sun’s diameter. The twilight effect was somewhat weird. The light was neither like that of day nor of night. The orange tint of the sunlight was completely lost, and in its place was a whiteness suggestive of moonlight, though the effect was rather that of the illumination of electric light in the sharpness and blackness of the shadows cast. With the failure of the light, too, there was a vary perceptible fall m the temperature, which was noted by all observers. In Glasgow the partial eclipse was larger than in London, and the sun appeared as a thin and brilliant crescent, the horns of which thinned to a narrow golden line at maximum. Throughout Scotland the morning was brilliantly fine.
Venus, now the brightest of the planets, is reported to have been seen by some people in the Home Counties of England, but no glimpse was caught of Mercury or Venus, or of any of the bright stars, except with telescopic aid.
London numbered its amateur astronomers by tens of thousands. Every car and ’bus going Citywards had the top crowded with passengers, many of whom carried improvised means for seeing the sun without endangering eyesight. Those on foot chose the sunny side of the street, pausing now and again to peer through their bit of smoked glass. When office work began there were many smudgy noses. In all the trains faces looked out of the window on the side from which the sun was visible. The enterprising vendor was early about the streets, offering pieces of coloured or smoked glass at prices that rose from a copper or two to as high as sixpence. Notably in Trafalgar Square one did quite good business. A cinema firm distributed free over the City and West-end, by means of sandwich men, 250,000 feet of cinema film in short sections, which served the day’s purpose admirably.
Every district of the metropolis has its own incident to record. At St Martin’s Schools both teachers and scholars, to the number of some hundreds, assembled in the playground to watch the eclipse. Crossing the Horse Guards Parade, a young lady carried a smoked glass almost a foot square, which from time to time she held before her eyes. A Whitehall habitué wore a coloured monocle, infected with the universal interest, a taxi-driver smoked the glass of his head lamp, and after satisfying himself offered a view to any passing. There is nothing like a solar eclipse for popularising astronomy.
It was stated in the meteorological report issued last night that during the eclipse the thermometer exposed in the sun showed a big fall of temperature, but this was not the case in the shade. At Kew the record was: in the shade – 8.35 a.m., 42deg, 9.47, 44deg, 11.5; 48deg; in the sun – 8.35, 79deg, 9.47, 52deg, and 11.5, 98deg.