SYDNEY: The moon will block the sun in the first solar eclipse of the year on Tuesday (April 29), and stargazers in Australia have some of the best seats on the planet.
Two online skywatching groups — the Slooh community telescope and the Virtual Telescope Project — will provide live webcasts of the solar eclipse from Australia, beginning at 2 a.m. EDT (0600 GMT) on Tuesday. You can watch those solar eclipse webcasts live on Space.com. It will be Tuesday afternoon local time across Australia during the eclipse, with the sun setting before the event concludes.
Solar eclipses occur when the moon passes between the sun and earth, as seen from the surface of the earth, and blocks part or all of the sun's disk. When the moon and sun align perfectly, a total solar eclipse occurs. Because the moon's orbit around earth is tilted, the moon and sun don't align in an eclipse every month.
Tuesday's solar eclipse will be what scientists call an annular solar eclipse. The event, also known as a "ring of fire" solar eclipse, occurs when the sun is too far from earth to completely obscure the sun's disk. The result is a bright ring of sunlight around the moon's silhouette, as viewed from the earth's surface.
But on Tuesday, the potentially dazzling "ring of fire" eclipse will only be visible from one uninhabited spot in Antarctica, where the only audience may be penguins on the frigid landscape.
"This is a thoroughly bizarre eclipse," Slooh astronomer Bob Berman said in a statement. "When Slooh brings its live feeds from Australia, and we watch in real time as the inky black hemisphere of the moon partially obscures the sun, the greatest thrill might be an awareness of what's occurring — unseen by any human — in a tiny region of Antarctica."
The April 29 solar eclipse will begin at 1:15 p.m. local time in Perth, the capital of Western Australia, and end at 3:59 p.m. local time. The time of greatest eclipse occurs at 2:41 p.m., when the moon will obscure about 65 percent of the solar disk. The event will begin later in the day for observers in Melbourne (3:58 p.m. local time) and Sydney (4:13 p.m.), with the sun setting before the eclipse ends.
Tuesday's solar eclipse is the second eclipse of 2014 after the total lunar eclipse on April 15. The next total lunar eclipse will occur on Oct. 8 and will be primarily visible from the Pacific Ocean and its bordering coastlines. A partial solar eclipse visible from most of the United States and parts of Canada will then follow on Oct. 23.
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