Millions of people from the eastern US traveled all the way from Europe to Russia and China. Today, June 10, a solar eclipse was caught across Canada, Greenland, the Arctic, and Russia. Known as the “ring of fire”, where the moon covers the solar disk but peeks behind a sliver of the sun. The image of the eclipse is slowly pouring in with some dazzling sightings around the world, although strange clouds have thwarted many people’s efforts to see it. However, if you miss it, here are a few print shots we’ve seen.
The eclipse began before sunrise in the United States, so some spectacular views of the crescent red sun were seen as it rose eastward. Although the area marked on the way to the totality is not as populated as the preceding eclipse, there have been a number of great shots of the whole event, mostly obscured by the sun.
This one is found in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, where the moon covers the sun as much as possible in this sequence, the alignment of three cosmic bodies in a single line. The effect of fire is due to the relative position of the moon in orbit around the earth. The orbit is not circular, but elliptical, so there are times when the moon is a little farther away, it appears smaller than the earth.
When the moon is farther away (apogee) when there is an eclipse you get the ring of fire instead of the total eclipse. The Moon’s orbit is more inclined than the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, so there are no eclipses every month. Our planets, moons, and stars need to be CJG and this happens at predictable intervals. It is not easy to calculate these, but many ancient civilizations did it.
Today we can easily search online for the next one, but as a last resort you can always check that Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of Heart is suddenly going to the music hit lists, which is almost as predictable as the eclipse.
