🌘Partial solar eclipse on 29 March 2025

The Moon covered part of the Sun for a couple of hours around midday on 29 March 2025, deepest over north-eastern Canada and Greenland and a modest bite over northern Europe. Watched through borrowed school glasses from a pavement in Marsh End.

Seen from the pavement outside 🏋️ Chalkline Climbing in Marsh End, from about 11:20 to 13:00, with Caleb Ostrow and his counted box of glasses.

For me: fourteen days earlier the sky gave me cloud on my birthday. This one was owed.

For the notes: a fifth of the Sun was missing and the daylight did not change at all. The eye adjusts and reports that nothing is happening. I thought about that for the rest of the afternoon, because it is the same fault as a dashboard average: a large change in the source, and no visible change in the total. You need the right instrument, and somebody who knows to hand it to you.

For Caleb: he explains falls with physics every Saturday. Today the physics turned up on time and in public. He has not stopped mentioning it.

• A real event. A partial solar eclipse on Saturday 29 March, seen across Europe, north-west Africa and the far north-east of North America. Nowhere on Earth saw it total.
• Late morning into lunchtime here, with the deepest point a little after noon. Roughly a fifth of the Sun gone, by my guess and by the coverage for this latitude.
• Caleb Ostrow brought a box of cardboard eclipse glasses from the physics cupboard at school, counted out and to be counted back in. We stood on the pavement outside 🏋️ Chalkline Climbing in chalky trousers, passing them round.
• About fifteen climbers, a delivery driver, two children and a dog called Smear, all looking up. Caleb gave a three-minute lesson nobody had asked for. It was good.
• Through the glasses: an orange disc with a neat curved piece missing at the top. Without them: a normal bright Saturday. You would never have known.
• My first slab-only session, fourteen days after the finger. I was glad of a reason to be outside and not looking at the yellow crimp.