Solar eclipse of August 1, 2008
The total solar eclipse on 1 August 2008 took place mainly from in extremely sparsely populated regions in the Canadian and European Arctic and Western Siberia. The zone of the total eclipse began in the famous Northwest Passage, near the settlement of Cambridge Bay and then crossed the islands of the Canadian Arctic, which is one politically for the region of Nunavut. There are, in the vast area are a few settlements, but the umbra was only about 1 m 37 s to about 160 inhabitants in the south of Grise Fiord Ellesmere Iceland and its now uninhabited neighboring Craig Harbour; Resolute Bay was narrowly missed. A few minutes later the black sun appeared over the Canadian military base alert, and then through the uninhabited northern Greenland and the Arctic Ocean; it has been touched with the Russian Novaya Zemlya and the extreme northeast of Europe. The mainland, however, was reached only beyond the Urals in the Asian part of Russia.
In the sparsely populated Northwest Siberia world time the maximum eclipse was at 10:21 clock at 65 ° 39 'north latitude and 72 ° 16 east longitude with 2 m 27 s duration and 104% coverage ( the lunar disk is larger than the visible sky solar disk ) listed. The umbra in the late afternoon local time About 25 minutes later fell for 2 m 19 s to the big city Novosibirsk. After more cities in southern Siberia witnesses to the rare spectacle, were the central zone drew both sides of the border between Mongolia and China to the southwest. Towards evening the sun reached the area around the historic Silk Road and the Great Wall before the eclipse ended at sunset in the region between the cities of Xian and Zhengzhou.
The solar eclipse on August 1, 2008 was visible in the north- western Canada, Greenland and Iceland, in Europe north of the Mediterranean and in almost all of Asia as partial solar eclipse. High coverages, leading to a noticeable weakening of daylight were achieved in large parts of the Arctic, in northern and north-eastern Europe, Siberia, Central Asia, Nepal, northern India and vast areas of China.
The darkness in Central Europe
The solar eclipse on 1 August 2008 was seen by the entire German -speaking area of only as a partial eclipse. The sun was darkened at a place 50 degrees north latitude and 10 degrees east longitude to a maximum of 10.9%. In the north, it was significantly more ( Flensburg good 23 %), to the south and south-west still significantly less ( almost 8% Munich, Bern little over 2 %). Coverages above were much too low to cause significant weakening of the daylight. Without direct observation of the sun ( by a suitable protective glasses or filter film or with the projection method ) was therefore of this celestial event not to notice.