Darkness at noon in city on July 22

Srinivas Laxman | TNN

After a gap of 10 years, a major celestial event, a total solar eclipse will be visible in parts of India on July 22.

Nehru Planetarium director, Piyush Pandey, said in a press release on Wednesday that in Mumbai the eclipse will be a partial event, with the sun appearing like a bitten-off biscuit. In the city, the sun will rise at 6.12 am when the eclipse would have already begun. At 6.22 am, 96 per cent of the sun’s diameter will be obscured by the moon. The partial eclipse will end in Mumbai at 7.19 am, he said.

“July is a month of rains. No one can predict with any confidence where you will have clear skies and no rainfall on July 22. Analysing the weather pattern of the past 20 years it seems Patna, Varanasi and their neighbourhood offer better viewing prospects for enthusiasts,’’
Pandey added.

He said the eclipse will begin at Surat, Gujarat at 6.21 am and leave India at the border of Arunachal Pradesh at 6.36 am. “It will zoom from one end of India to another in about 15 minutes, faster than a jet plane,’’ he said. He added many Indian cities will come in the eclipse’s path and it will roughly have a 200-km wide belt. At Surat the totality of the eclipse will be 3 minutes and 17 seconds and it will increase to 4 minutes and 20 seconds, north of Dibrugarh, in Assam.

The greatest duration of totality on Earth will be in the Pacific Ocean, south east of Japan, where the totality will last for 6 minutes 39 seconds.

When does a solar eclipse occur?
On New Moon, when the Moon passes between the Earth and Sun. If the Moon’s shadow falls upon Earth then a portion of the Sun’s disk is ‘eclipsed’ by the Moon

Partial eclipse
Areas which fall within the Moon’s faint outer shadow witness a partial solar eclipse

Total eclipse
Total solar eclipses are visible in places within the Moon’s dark inner shadow

Precautions
Eclipses, especially partial ones, are dangerous to look at because the un-eclipsed part of the Sun is still very bright

Permanent eye damage can result from looking at the Sun directly, through a camera viewfinder, binoculars or a telescope or even using sunglasses

Only use special solar filters or a specially created pinhole camera to watch an eclipse. Even while using a filter, take care not to stare at the Sun for long. Watch the eclipse through the filter briefly and then look away

Mumbai
will witness only a partial eclipse. In the city it will start before sunrise at 6.12 am and, after peaking at 6.22 am, it will end at 7.19 am