Solar eclipse of February 7, 2008

The annular solar eclipse of February 7, 2008 took place over parts of Antarctica and the Southern Pacific and could be experienced in its partial phase in southeastern Australia and New Zealand. The eclipse of Saros series 121 occurred in the ascending lunar node of the lunar orbit and was the 60th of a comprehensive 71 eclipses series. It is a coming to an end Saros cycle, which thereby shows that already on the next eclipse of the same family will be the last ring appearance of this series on February 17, 2026. The remaining ten eclipses run partially with decreasing size.

Due to the relatively shallow angle of incidence of the extended umbra axis the area annularity reached 444.6 km a considerable width, the ring phase itself lasted only a maximum of 2 minutes and 14 seconds. The eclipse took place - from Europe unnoticed - between 02:38:22 and 07:11:45 CET clock clock CET, while the Moon's shadow axis from 04:19:38 CET to 05:30:32 clock clock CET on Antarctica and the South Pacific grazed. On some Pacific islands, such as the Samoa and Tahiti, the sun rose before the end of the darkness below the horizon ( see map). In the remaining regions of the pre-transition of the moon could be seen from the sun in full length.