Sixteen years after the last Eclipse to reach British shores, the first eclipse of the social media age has impressed many but it’s also interesting to see how technology has progressed since that time.
Domestic British access to the internet was still mainly dial-up modem based on August 11 1999 when Cornwall was the only part of mainland Britain to experience the total eclipse (and even then much of the county was under clouds).
Today we can get much faster internet speeds in our mobile phones, many of which are capable of taking far better digital images than then digital cameras available in the late 90s and could even be said to be more powerful than the desktop computers available at the time.
Where email was seen as the new method of communicating around the world in the 90s, we can now see each other and have live conversations face to face using our mobile devices.
Today’s eclipse was partial throughout the British Isles, with the Faroe Islands and Svalbard the only populated land reachable by public transport in order to view the eclipse. The weather was much kinder to various parts of the UK and the sheer amount of pictures and articles available on today’s internet and social media has been simply astounding.
One amazing image that has been posted on Twitter by Astronaut Sam Cristoforetti, the first Italian woman in space, is a picture taken from the International Space Station showing the shadow of the moon as it races across the surface of the Earth.
I think this is it: the umbra. Looking aft on our flightpath around maximum obscuration time. #SolarEclipse pic.twitter.com/rYz7UTpHLv
— Samantha Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) March 20, 2015
The first component of the ISS was launched the year before the 1999 eclipse and it has been occupied continuously for over fourteen years.
It’ll be a further eleven years until the next eclipse visible from British shores, a full 27 years and a day since the 1999 eclipse, and we should look forward to the next great leaps of technology to enable us to enjoy more of these celestial events.