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Ian Griffin heads south to watch the moon partially eclipse the sun
What will you do at the end of the day on Friday afternoon?
For once, I do not need diary will be. This is because, having spoken to the U3A of Invercargill at 10am, I will catch the 13h flight from Invercargill to Stewart Island in order to attend a celestial alignment rather rare and probably almost invisible.
By 3:44 pm, I am planning to have my camera pointing to the sun, of a suitable place somewhere near Oban. For the next eight minutes, I hope to observe a brief partial solar eclipse, during which the dark disc of the moon will glide through and obscure a tiny ribbon of the northern limb of the sun.
I am sure that if I succeed in photographing eclipse, it will almost certainly be the shortest and most partial solar eclipse that I will have enjoyed in my life.
Partial eclipses of the sun are quite common. During these events (which can occur only at the new moon), the moon, the sun and the earth do not align in a perfectly straight line, and only the outer part of the shadow of the moon, called penumbra, falls on Earth. For observers on the ground, it seems that the moon has bitten the sun.
The best place to see Friday's eclipse is, in fact, on the Antarctic continent, from where about 33% of the sun will be hidden by the mid-eclipse moon. Observers in Tasmania, which are close to the edge of the moon's shadow, will see a little over 3% of the sun obscured.
Stewart Island is right at the edge of the moon's shadow for this eclipse and, for this reason, only 0.012% of the sun will be obscured. It will be almost impossible to see. It will also require a special solar telescope that allows me to photograph the sun safely.
You can ask, why am I doing this? Why travel to Rakiura, where it is almost certain to be cloudy, to witness an almost invisible event of less than eight minutes? That, dear reader, is the addictive power of astronomy!
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