Francis Willughby and the Solar Eclipse

There is a partial solar eclipse visible in the UK on 29th March 2025 at 10am. To mark this event, we thought we would do a post about when one of the residents of Middleton Hall studied a solar eclipse all the way back in 1666!

Francis Willughby FRS, is most renowned for his interest in nature, in particular zoology, but he was also interested in astronomy. On 22nd June 1666, he officially scientifically monitored and recorded a solar eclipse for the Royal Society.

The Royal Society journal, Philosophical Transactions, published his observations. It stated that Willughby along with Dr Walter Pope, Mr Robert Hooke and Mr Philips observed the eclipse of the sun in London for the Royal Society using Mr Boyle’s 60-foot telescope.

They recorded that the eclipse had begun at 5:43 a.m. and continued for one hour and 54 minutes. They wrote that they had observed the figure of the eclipse and measured the “digits” by casting the figure (or image) through a 5-foot telescope onto an extended paper, which was fixed at a certain distance from the eye-glass. As the figure was round, the diameters were divided by six concentric circles and then divided into 12 digits. The greatest obscurity during this eclipse was measured as somewhat more than seven digits. It was remarked that, about the middle, between the perpendicular and the westward horizontal radius of the sun, they perceived a little of the limb of the moon without the disc of the sun, which seemed to some of the observers to come from some shining atmosphere about the body of either the sun or the moon.

Photograph taken at Middleton Hall during partial solar eclipse in 2015. Photograph taken by Joanna Habart.

Further Reading: Francis Willughby, Walter Pope, Robert Hooke & Mr Philips, "Observations made in several places, of the late eclipse of the sun, which hapned on the 22 of June, 1666", Philosophical Transactions, vol. 1 (17), 1666, pp.295-297. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1665.0111

Author - Debbie Jordan, Middleton Hall Volunteer.

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