Solar eclipse set to plunge UK and Europe into darkness
Millions of people could witness the best solar eclipse in years seen from the UK and northern Europe later. The event's geometry means that in the UK the Sun will be between 83% and 98% covered, from about 09:23 GMT onwards. Read more
It will have a magnitude of 1.045. The longest duration of totality will be 2 minutes 47 seconds off the coast of the Faroe Islands. It is the last total solar eclipse visible in Europe until the eclipse of August 12, 2026. Read more
Title: Citizen Science on the Faroe Islands in Advance of an Eclipse Author: Geoff Sims, Kate Russo
On 2015 March 20, a total solar eclipse will occur in the North Atlantic, with the Kingdom of Denmark's Faroe Islands and Norway's Svalbard archipelago (formerly Spitzbergen) being the only options for land-based observing. The region is known for wild, unpredictable, and often cloudy conditions, which potentially pose a serious threat for people hoping to view the spectacle. We report on a citizen-science, weather-monitoring project, based in the Faroe Islands, which was conducted in March 2014 - one year prior to the eclipse. The project aimed to promote awareness of the eclipse among the local communities, with the data collected providing a quantitative overview of typical weather conditions that may be expected in 2015. It also allows us to validate the usefulness of short-term weather forecasts, which may be used to increase the probability of observing the eclipse.
The Partial Solar Eclipse of Friday 20th March 2015
From these data, and considering only the last 20-year period (1995-2014), we find an average of only 3 hours strong sunshine per day during the last twenty March 20th's, and on only four of those days could the Sun reasonably have been seen around 9.30 am. This suggests that there is a probability of about 20-30% for the clouds in Armagh to part sufficiently to enable observations of the full duration of the eclipse. Read more (PDF)