Darryl Gove's blog
Friday Aug 01, 2008
Eclipses
The BBC has some footage of the 1st August solar eclipse which started in Canada, covering part of Russia, before ending in China ("The Olympic Eclipse").
The NASA website has a bundle of information about past and future eclipses. Probably most useful is this map which shows a world map of future eclipses.
Wikipedia has this to say about the four types of solar eclipse:
- A total eclipse occurs when the Sun is completely obscured by the Moon. The intensely bright disk of the Sun is replaced by the dark silhouette of the Moon, and the much fainter corona is visible. During any one eclipse, totality is visible only from at most a narrow track on the surface of the Earth.
- An annular eclipse occurs when the Sun and Moon are exactly in line, but the apparent size of the Moon is smaller than that of the Sun. Hence the Sun appears as a very bright ring, or annulus, surrounding the outline of the Moon.
- A hybrid eclipse is intermediate between a total and annular eclipse. At some points on the surface of the Earth it is visible as a total eclipse, whereas at others it is annular. Hybrid eclipses are rather rare.
- A partial eclipse occurs when the Sun and Moon are not exactly in line, and the Moon only partially obscures the Sun. This phenomenon can usually be seen from a large part of the Earth outside of the track of an annular or total eclipse. However, some eclipses can only be seen as a partial eclipse, because the umbra never intersects the Earth's surface.
Posted at 09:57AM Aug 01, 2008 by Darryl Gove in Personal |
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