Corfe Castle at sunrise
Parts of Dorset including Dorchester and Blandford witnessed the solar eclipse on Friday 20th March 2015 – a rare phenomenon in which the sun is obscured by the moon as the moon passes between it and the Earth.
A solar eclipse only happens on a new moon and the last time an eclipse happened in the UK was 1999.
A total solar eclipse was experienced in the Faroe Islands and Svalbard in Norway but Dorset saw around 85% coverage as the county turned to temporary twilight.
The eclipse technically started at 07:41 UK time and ended at 11:50 UK time, but the peak was around 9:30am.
Unfortunately for the UK, large parts of the country, including Dorset had too much cloud coverage to see anything.
The word eclipse comes from ekleipsis, an ancient Greek word that means obscured, or abandoned.
The UK will not experience a solar eclipse on this scale again until 2026.
