I remember standing on a hillside in August 1999 with my children to watch the solar eclipse. We bought some eclipse glasses and walked up onto the hill to watch it. It was the most magical, eerie, wonderful thing to witness.
As the sun disappeared behind the moon, the skies darkened, the birds went silent and it felt like the world was holding its breath.
The 1999 solar eclipse was the grande finale of several cosmic events that happened in the 1990’s with two magnificent comets visible in our skies too.
During the the solar eclipse 2015 it was foggy. We took students up onto the common to watch, hopeful that the fog would clear long enough for us to witness the spectacle. Sadly the fog persisted and the best thing I saw was a couple of locals with tin foil hats on their heads and another was wearing a colander - ‘to protect them from aliens’ they told me when asked.
In a couple of weeks time there is going to be a nearly full (95%) solar eclipse. I have already bought the eclipse glasses for me and my grownup children, and filters for my cameras.
There are days when it's easy to become absorbed by everything happening around us. Then, every so often, nature reminds us that there are far bigger things unfolding above our heads. For a few minutes, the everyday disappears, and we're simply spectators.
Whenever I think about eclipses, I'm reminded of a line from the film Contact. Ellie (Jodie Foster) said in the film "how tiny and insignificant, and how rare and precious we all are."
It captures something I've never quite been able to put into words—the feeling of how small we are, and yet how extraordinary it is simply to be here to witness moments like these.