Not far that far off normal, I should have thought. We perceive light logarithmically, not linearly. In 1999 here, with 97% coverage, it became sort of gloomy for around 3 minutes, and just as I wondered if it was my imagination that it felt colder - it brightened up again.

Best way I can describe the brief darkenss (solely based on my 2015 experience) is that it is similar to that dark, looming 'yellowness' just before a summer storm hits. 

My experience is that when the eclipse is around 50%, I notice a subtle change in the quality of the light level.

Another factor is that the sun is descending in altitude, so the sunlight has to pass through a denser atmosphere as the sun descends.  The eclipse will be darker than if the same eclipse had occurred around solar noon on the same day.

I somewhat remember the sky towards the north west being a bit darker during the March 2015 eclipse.

https://ukwct.org.uk/weather/shadows.jpg 

https://ukwct.org.uk/weather/crescent.jpg 

Despite the fact that we're currently in the middle of a fairly hot spell of weather with high pressure nearby, this is yet another astronomical event which has been spoilt by there being too much cloud around which is pretty much typical of how these events tend to pan out here.😡

Strange atmosphere!!

I am watching the live coverage of that on the BBC which has been showing us the scenes from the top of Calton Hill.

There, I can see that the sky to the west where the BBC cameras are pointing, looks fairly bright with the crescent Sun still doing its best to get through all of the cloud yet at the same time, it’s dark and gloomy, almost like a very dull day around the time of the winter solstice.

It's really odd how that works, Retron. It actually makes no sense. Light is light, no matter what 'shape' it is. 

https://i.ibb.co/0y4FTXjK/2026-08-12-190313-Solar.jpg 

It's to do with the fact that sunlight comes from slightly different angles as the sun is a certain size in the sky - so by removing some (but not all) of those potential angles, you in effect get a more noticeable pinhole camera effect everywhere (as ordinarily of course they're full circles being projected by trees etc). And another side effect is that the shadows become sharper around 85% or so, as there's fewer angles of light being received to blur things. That's the basic version, anyway, as told in that encyclopedia I mentioned; I'm sure some of the sciency types on here would explain more!

Very weird indeed.

You saw much more than us. A real non event in Edinburgh

The Crescent Sun. 

...and as seen on my shed at the same time! There's something about eclipses, isn't there, that draws fascination from everyone it seems!

https://ukwct.org.uk/weather/shed.jpg