Notes on the Solar Eclipse (August 12, 2026)
6.15 am. Aberystwyth. In the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Six, we witnessed an astronomical event, whereupon 93% of our Sun’s disc was occluded.
The Promenade and North Beach were crowded, like they are in picture-postcards of the town in its heyday, during the 1950s and 60s. Some visitors had travelled a considerable distance to be here. Many people turned up with colanders and crudely made variations on a pinhole camera. Scientists from the University’s Department of Physics had erected impressive astronomical telescopes. (This was a research opportunity for the astronomers.) The Department also provided a live-stream feed viewable from a screen on campus, where protective glasses were handed out to spectators. At the bandstand, where I was based, the few pairs in evidence were shared around. Bonhomie, in abundance. Those gathered were an ephemeral community, defined and united by a common experience. We stood, staring in the same direction like witnesses to a nuclear test.
While most of us no longer ascribe portentous significance to an eclipse, the occurrence is no less phenomenal, in every sense of that word. The event connected our experience with that of our most remote ancestors. Only our respective assumptions about the phenomenon were different. However, I did still register a mild shiver of primeval nervousness during the proceedings.
I felt the slow sublimity of the Moon’s passage as it devoured the solar disc, bite by bite. We could no more halt its path than turn back the tide. As our satellite processed, the orange-ochre Sun — as it appeared through my semi-opaque shields — began to look like the former’s waxing crescent. The tide seemed to still somewhat, as more and more on the Sun was covered.
But it was the polarisation of the ambient light that engaged me most. The quality is unlike anything witnessed at dawn or dusk. Shadows remain more-or-less constant, but the overall exposure diminishes. ‘These are the colours of my dreams’, I thought.
See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Studium; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice