An eclipse over Isandlwana

A British camp was overrun in Zululand while a partial eclipse was taking the top off the Sun.

Maximum eclipse came at about 12:36 UT, a little after half past two in the afternoon on the local clock, with roughly 55% of the Sun covered. That is a dimming, not a darkness — the accounts of a battlefield plunged into night are later embroidery, and the historian Ian Knight has taken the story apart at length. The eclipse was real; the blackness was not.