fyr.io

This has been posted as part of Blaugust 2026. Do not look directly at it without the appropriate safety equipment.

Yesterday was a partial eclipse in my part of the world, approx 92% of the sun was obscured by the moon as it passed on it's long long journey falling to earth and missing.

We were very lucky to see if in the way we did. Before I get into that, here's some pictures. They're not great, all I had was my phone. Oh, if you're just here for the pictures there's a bonus picture at the bottom of this post which I thought was pretty cool.

They're not the best quality. The camera didn't pick up the crispness of it at all. Ah well, I only grabbed the phone occasionally, I prefer to experience an event rather than photograph it constantly on a crap camera :)

We were lucky to see it the way we did. First, my wife found a crazy good deal on a hotel room for the night, situated right at the seaside. This is a hotel we've stayed in once before, and she booked it right away for us all to stay for the night. It was a fantastic spot to view the eclipse, sitting on the beach with some food, with dozens (if not hundreds) of other people, watching the light fade away. Idyllic.

We had ordered some of those cardboard eclipse viewing glasses for this - I remember seeing the eclipse in 1999 and the memory of standing on a balcony watching the sun disappear and the world get dark during the day has stuck with me. I wanted that for my kid! However... Tuesday we got an email saying the glasses wouldn't be delivered until Thursday. That wouldn't do at all.

We went online searching for some to order and, obviously, nowhere had any. I even checked out a science lab to see if they had some we could use but nope, nothing. Dejection, sadness, frustration at our order being confirmed pretty far in advance yet failing to pan out... I felt like crap. My wife even explained to our kid that we wouldn't get to see the eclipse, but we could do the pinhole trick so all was not lost.

That Tuesday evening, I got to my car to leave work at the same time as another work colleague who asked about any eclipse plans. I explained the situation. She said she might have a spare pair of the glasses. She had ordered some online too, a pack of 5, but they only needed 4.

Hope!

She offered me the spare pair. I jumped at it! Luckily she lives in the same direction and passed our home on her way to work, and she was coming to work the following day (Wednesday, the day of the eclipse) - I would have driven to hers wherever it was, but no, she knew we were gong to the hotel that day and said she would try to drop them off so we didn't have to worry about it.

The next morning, she delivered not one pair of glasses, but three, and a filter for a camera! A family member of hers also had a couple spare, and she went to the effort of going to theirs and collecting them for us.

The kindness of it! These things were like gold dust that day, she could have sold them!

Because of her, all three of us were able to watch the eclipse with our own eyeballs (with breaks, of course!)

We even had a few people on the beach without them who asked to borrow ours - we of course let them use two of them (the first pair was solely reserved for our kid, who I was going to let watch it at any point he wanted, luckily we didn't need to turn anyone away) - it's not the same at all, but I feel like we passed on a fraction of the kindness showed to us with the very same glasses.

I took a few no-light-filter pictures of the back of my kids head as he watched the eclipse, thought it would make a good perspective. They came out with an inverted, very clear reflection of the eclipse on the lens. Here's one I've cropped:

Now that's a lens flare!

I wish I had a really good camera (and was any good at photography) but the important thing is that we could watch it together, safely, happily, with clear skies. What a great time we had. The hotel stay and day before and after was fantastic too.