The much anticipated annular solar eclipse that is going to occur on Thursday will not be visible in India except in some parts of Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh for a few minutes before the sunset, a prominent astrophysicist said.
The annular solar eclipse occurs when the sun, moon and the earth come in a straight line and almost on the same plane. It is a partial eclipse when a ring of fire appears in the sky.
The path of the eclipse will not touch almost any part of India, barring the North-Eastern extremes of the country in Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh, Director of M P Birla Planetarium, Debiprasad Duari, said in Kolkata on Tuesday.
“In Arunachal Pradesh, people can see, just before the sunset, a minuscule fraction of the sun covered by the moon, that is also very low in the horizon, lasting at the most 3-4 minutes depending upon the position,” Duari said.
“On the northern borders, in Ladakh, a sliver of land in the border region can experience the last phase of the partial eclipse, again for a short duration, but relatively at a higher altitude than the eastern part of the country,” he said.
One can see a very small part of the solar eclipse from the vicinity of Dibang Wildlife Sanctuary in Arunachal Pradesh at around 5:52 pm. In the northern part of Ladakh, where the sun will set at around 6.15 pm, the last phases of the phenomenon can be seen at around 6 pm. Meanwhile, the eclipse can be seen from a vast region of North America, Europe and Asia, Duari said.