Edmund Heaphy | Deputy Editor
Trinity Astrophysicists today struggled to welcome Friday’s solar eclipse due to dense cloud cover, despite a well-attended event aiming to help the public safely view the eclipse from Front Square.
ECLIPSE 2015, an event organised by Peter Gallagher, an Associate Professor of Physics in Trinity College Dublin, brought high-tech telescopes and specially designed eclipse shades to Front Square, aiming to broaden the public understanding of the sun and how variations in its solar output affect the Earth’s inhabitants.
Speaking before the event, Shaun Bloomfield, Senior Research Fellow in Physics at Trinity, said: “It’ll be the last chance to see such an amazing phenomenon for some time, seeing as the next solar eclipse that will be visible from Europe will be in 2026.”
Gallagher took to the skies this morning on an Irish Air Corps Maritime Patrol Aircraft to capture high-resolution imagery of the eclipse, spearheading what Trinity calls “a truly international collaboration of solar researchers investigating the eclipse”, with researchers from the University of Hawaii and Aberystwyth University on board to take high resolution images of the solar atmosphere.
The sky was at its darkest at about 9.30 am this morning, with 90 per cent of the sun covered by the moon. If it weren’t for the cloud clover, the planet Venus would have been visible.
Photo by Sinead Baker for The University Times
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