A very rare solar eclipse was visible from the UK during the morning of Friday 20th March 2015.
WHAT IS A SOLAR ECLIPSE?
A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon’s orbit lines up in between the Sun and the Earth.
The Moon blocks out the Sun’s light for a short time, casting a shadow on the Earth.
It’s a rare event and only possible when the Moon is at exactly the right distance from the Earth.

We did not look at the sun directly. The safest way to view a solar eclipse was to project it onto a piece of paper. Using paper and tin foil, we made a pinhole projector. This proved to be a very effective way to view the eclipse safely. The image of the eclipse was projected onto the school wall for everybody to see.

We stood with the sun behind us to project the image of the eclipse through our pinhole projectors onto white paper taped to the walls. Everybody took a turn to use the projector and was able to clearly see the image of the eclipse.
Because eclipses can also affect the weather, the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading is running NEWEx, the National Eclipse Weather Experiment, a citizen science project to collect weather data during the solar eclipse for detailed analysis. Elphinstone participated in this Science project and submitted our data via BBC Stargazing.

We took temperatures and recorded them at regular intervals. During the eclipse, the temperature dropped rapidly.

Throughout our observations, we noted that the wind speed and direction also changed.

P6/7 pupils entered all our weather data into the NEWEx website tables.


