Phil Evans from our X-ray and Observational Astronomy Group took the opportunity to go up to the Fifth Floor of the Charles Wilson Building with his camera and captured these terrific images of this morning’s partial solar eclipse at about quarter past eight.

Many parts of the UK were covered with cloud this morning, disappointing sky-watchers, but Leicester had broken clouds that allowed Phil to get off some marvellous snaps, of which we present a few here.

You can visit Phil's web-album for the full sequence of 49 eclipse images and you can read his description of how he captured the images on the BBC Leicester website.

At this latitude and longitude, maximum eclipse occurred just before sunrise but there was still a good 65-70% bite out of the Sun.

This was the only one of 2011’s partial eclipses visible from the UK. The next time that British astronomers will be able to view an eclipse this extensive won’t be until 2013.

• Department of Physics and Astronomy