12 August 2026, 6.47 pm.

I noticed these crescent-shaped patterns on the wall behind our Tai Chi instructor, Pat, as we finished our session yesterday. They’d been projected through a lattice of foliage and the vertical blinds of the Primrose Hall, Horbury. You can get a similar effect by projecting the Sun’s disc through a colander.

Every week as we practice Tai Chi, we ‘Gather the Celestial Energy’ and move our hands around an imaginary ball which we visualise as being about the size of one of these crescents.

One of the students had popped out with a cardboard carton pinhole camera during the session to check on the progress of the Moon as it started to cross the disc of the Sun.

6.56 pm. The dark circle is the shadow of the telescope.

I’d brought my telescope to project the eclipse after the class. By now as the Moon was approaching its maximum coverage of the solar disc, covering about 95% at 7 pm.

We never lost the daylight as a brilliant slither of Sun remained throughout the eclipse, still far too brilliant to look at directly. But it did drop slightly darker and there was a harmonious ‘golden hour’ light as we drove home from Horbury.

We’re down in a dip here at the lower end of Coxley Valley with houses across the road to the west, so we never get an unrestricted view of a sunset but there was a patch of sunlight reaching our front lawn.

Wild Yorkshire

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