Today sees the first solar eclipse in 15 years. Here's everything you need to know about watching it.

The eclipse will be visible over Dorset from 8.30am to 10.30am.

 

The eclipse starts at 8.30am, when coverage will be 6%. The peak, 86% eclipse, will be at 9.40am, and the sun will be clear again by 10.30am.

Don’t look directly at the sun. An eclipse makes it easier to do so, but you still risk retinal burns causing significant and sometimes permanent loss of sight. If you’re likely to be driving towards the sun at the time of the eclipse, please bear this in mind.

Sunglasses won’t help. Neither can you use bin liners or other materials that look dense because they will let through infrared light and burn your retina.

The Royal College of Opthamologists says: "The general public must remember that they should not look directly at the solar eclipse with the naked eye, even if dark filters such as sunglasses or photographic negatives are used, nor through cameras, binoculars or telescopes. There is no safe system to directly view an eclipse.  Viewing the sun in such ways may lead to retinal burns which can cause significant and sometimes permanent loss of sight."

You CAN use eclipse glasses. But unless you’ve bought some already, you’re looking at £45 for a pair on Amazon. Everywhere else is pretty much out of stock.

Bridport and Lyme Regis News:

Glasses like this are being sold for £45 a pair on Amazon.

If you can find a Sky at Night magazine still in stock, they have a pair on the front of their March edition, and it’s possible (although not at this stage likely) that some national newspapers will have squirreled some to give away later with Thursday’s papers.

Schools across Dorset are being told to follow the Public Health England advice and not let children outside to see the eclipse without a pair of CE certified eclipse glasses.

If you don’t have glasses, all is not lost. The eclipse can be seen by projecting an image from a telescope or binoculars (cover one eyepiece with the lenscap) on to a piece of white card, using a mirror to cast the image on to a wall, or making a pin-hole viewer from pieces of card or a cereal box that acts like a lens.

How to make a cereal box viewer.

A colander can also be used to produce multiple eclipse images on a piece of paper.  Stand with your back to the sun, hold the colander in one hand and a piece of paper in the other with the sun shining through the colander onto the paper, giving you dozens of mini-eclipses to watch.  

Or if you know one, a welder’s mask makes great eclipse glasses.

Bridport and Lyme Regis News:

Know a welder? A welder's mask is a good way to watch the eclipse.

Won’t it be too cloudy to see anyway? The forecast is for cloud, which would mean, rather like the eclipse of 1999, that we won’t see very much.

Bridport and Lyme Regis News:

Click here to read about the eclipse that wasn’t: how clouds ruined Dorset’s view of the 1999 event

It will still get dark, though, and the cloud might be patchy enough to see some of the event. You can get accurate and up-to-date cloud cover forecasts from the Met Office website from Thursday.

It’s a pretty impressive astronomical sequence of events. On the evening before the eclipse, the Earth and the Moon are at the closest distance they can be to each other, making the moon a supermoon.

That makes the eclipse a “Spring Equinox Supermoon eclipse”, a totally made up title which means the supermoon, equinox, and eclipse will all fall on the same day.

If all else fails, there's always Professor Brian Cox. So you've got no glasses and it's too cloudy to see - from 9am on the BBC, Brian Cox and Dara O'Brien are hosting a special Stargazing Live, featuring footage from a plane flying 30,000 feet above the Faroe Islands -  one of only two sites in the world which will see totality. There's also a live webcast from the Slooh Community Observatory.