The first of six eclipses for 2011 happen tomorrow when a partial Solar Eclipse occurs over Europe, North Africa and central Asia. Normally this eclipse wouldn’t be worth mentioning as we can’t see it in Australian skies.
While we can’t see the eclipse directly, there is at least one observatory will be webcasting the eclipse live. The Bareket Observatory in Israel will webcast the eclipse from 5pm to 8pm AEST time tomorrow night our time. I have found a second website that states it will webcast the eclipse from Barcelona starting from 6.25pm AEST. There is no finish time listed on the website. Note that if you live in a state or territory that follows ‘Summer time’, you will need to add one hour to these times. Hopefully their skies will be clearer than ours have been!
The remaining eclipses occuring during 2011 are a Partial Solar Eclipse on 2 June (not directly visible from Australia), a Total Lunar Eclipse on 16 June (visible in our morning sky), a Partial Solar Eclipse on 1 July (not visible from Australia), a Partial Solar Eclipse on 25 November (visible from the Southern part of Tasmania) and a total Solar Eclipse on 10-11 December (visible in our evening sky). Note that I have converted the times to Australian Eastern Standard Time so a couple of them have different dates to what is listed on NASA’s Eclipse Website. The dates on the NASA site are listed (as per astronomical convention) in the Universal Time which is ten hours different to the Australian Eastern Time Zone.
Credit: Information used to prepare this blog was sourced from NASA’s Eclipse Website. A pdf version of the 4 January 2011 Partial Solar Eclipse fact sheet can be downloaded here.
