I have just come in from watching the lunar eclipse. We are lucky here well away from any street lights so that we get the real beauty of the night sky, and tonight there is no cloud. There was also a bonus: about ten minutes before the eclipse became complete I saw a 'falling star'.

I wanted to take a photo, but my little camera wasn't up to the job - or I wasn't: I got several pictures of unrelieved blackness and one of the clothes line - a bright blue streak across the blackness which left me confused for several seconds on first viewing the lamentable results of my photographic efforts!

On August 11th 1999 I took 11 year old Jacob, 8 year old Joshua and 5 year old Jessica to Lincoln for the day. We were too far north for the total solar eclipse, but we actually had the best of it as the south west (where the eclipse was total) had heavy cloud cover, while it was relatively clear over Lincolnshire. It seemed a good idea to watch what there was from the top of the Observatory Tower of Lincoln Castle. We weren't the only people with this bright idea and the 20 or so people there made it more of an event than it would have been watching from the garden at home. That evening we also discovered that we had been filmed from a distance and caught a fleeting glimpse of ourselves (wholly unrecognisable) on the local television news as part of their eclipse coverage. It is a strange thought that of all those people only Jessica and, perhaps, Joshua have an anything like realistic hope of witnessing the next total eclipse over Britain on September 23rd 2090.