Solar Eclipse
Partial Solar Eclipse of January 04
The first solar eclipse of 2011 occurs at the Moon's ascending node in eastern Sagittarius. The partial eclipse was visible from much of Europe, North Africa and central Asia (Figure 1).
The penumbral shadow first touched Earth's surface in northern Algeria at 06:40:11 UT. As the shadow travels east, Western Europe was treated to a partial eclipse at sunrise. The eclipse magnitude [1] from European cities like Madrid (0.576), Paris (0.732), London (0.747), and Copenhagen (0.826) gave early morning risers an excellent opportunity to photograph the sunrise eclipse with interesting foreground scenery.
Greatest eclipse [2] occurd at 08:50:35 UT in northern Sweden where the eclipse in the horizon had a magnitude of 0.858. At that time, the axis of the Moon's shadow passed a mere 510 km above Earth's surface. Most of northern Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia also were in the penumbra's path. The citizens of Cairo (0.551), Jerusalem (0.574), Istanbul (0.713), and Tehran (0.507) all witnessed a large magnitude partial eclipse.
A sunset eclipse was visible from central Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and northwest China. The partial eclipse ends when the penumbra leaft Earth at 11:00:54 UT.
Local circumstances and eclipse times for a number of cities in the penumbral path are listed in Table 1. All times are in Universal Time. The Sun's altitude and azimuth, the eclipse magnitude and eclipse obscuration [3] are all given at the instant of maximum eclipse. When the eclipse is in progress at sunrise or sunset, this information is indicated by a '-'.
The NASA JavaScript Solar Eclipse Explorer is an interactive web page that can quickly calculate the local circumstances of the eclipses from any geographic location not included in Table 1:
eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/JSEX/JSEX-index.html
This is the 14th eclipse of Saros 151 [4] (Espenak and Meeus, 2006). The family begins with a series of 18 partial eclipses from 1776 to 2083. Complete details for the entire series of 72 eclipses (in the order: 18 partial, 6 annular, 1 hybrid, 39 total and 8 partial) spanning 1280 years can be found at:
eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEsaros/SEsaros151.html
(Excerpt from http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/OH2011.html)
Below some pictures taken by Ernst de Mooij. Click on an image to enlarge.
