Skygazers across the Americas on Saturday turned their faces upward for a rare celestial event: an annular solar eclipse.
A crowd of people wearing protective eyewear gathered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, one of many across the western US watching as the moon passed between the sun and Earth at its furthest point from our planet.
Since it is so distant, it did not cover the Sun completely, creating a “ring of fire” effect that brought cheers from the crowd in Albuquerque.
Photo: AFP
“It’s majestic. We’re in awe,” said one viewer, Shannon Cozad.
At any given location, the eclipse was visible from between 30 seconds and five minutes.
The eclipse crossed into Mexico and Central America, then into South America through Colombia and northern Brazil before ending at sunset in the Atlantic Ocean.
Photo: AP
At the Bogota Planetarium, a crowd gathered around noon, waiting for the clouds to clear. When they did — and in time to see the eclipse — some observers shed tears, overwhelmed by emotion.
It was “a pretty beautiful moment ... an indescribable thing, without words,” said Jhoan Vinazco, a 25-year-old university student who had never seen an eclipse before.
The event also served as a dress rehearsal ahead of a total eclipse set for April next year.
Both eclipses are going to be “absolutely breathtaking for science,” said Madhulika Guhathakurta, a heliophysics program scientist at NASA.
Solar eclipses have a noticeable effect on the upper atmosphere, such as the ionosphere, which is full of charged particles and responsible for reflecting and refracting radio waves.
“Although the atmospheric effects of solar eclipses have been studied for over 50 years, many unanswered questions remain,” Guhathakurta said.
To study these effects, NASA planned three rocket launches on Saturday from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to gather data on the electric and magnetic fields, electron density and temperature.
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