Dr John Mason gave this experiment to us. The experiment was to investigate the effect the eclipse had on the amount of radiation reaching us from the sun.

We took radiation counts from a Geiger Counter over 5 minute's intervals during the eclipse. We did this using a semiautomatic Geiger Muller tube. The instrument would count all the ionising particles entering its tube over 5 minutes then we had to read, record and reset the counter.

The graph shows the results we collected. The total eclipse was at 14:12 and as you can see there is no real difference in the counts rate leading up to and after the eclipse. There is a very slight overall drop on the radiation, which is probably due to the sun being lower in the sky. This means that the sun's radiation, to get to us, has to travel through much more atmosphere and therefore gets far more scattered and absorbed.

Unfortunately due to the excitement of the total phase around this time our results begin to become less accurate. During the total phase we were all jumping around, shouting and being very excited which caused us to miss a few of the 5-minute readings. This isn't quite as bad as it sounds because the count just carried on over 10 minutes instead. So after 14:12 some of the results are averages of 10-20 minute counts rather that 5 minute ones. This accounts for the slightly jerky nature of the second half of the graph.