Solar Eclipse Over The Pacific

From my blog statistics I noticed that there has been a large spike of visitors to Fresh Brainz looking for information on the 22nd July solar eclipse.

Well, it has been rainy and overcast in Singapore so we can't see the Sun, but even if the sky was clear only about 6% of the solar disk is covered by the Moon from our location, so there isn't much to see.

Good thing that the Japanese TV company NHK has just uploaded this video of the eclipse relayed from a ship in the Pacific Ocean that is smack in the middle of the lunar shadow, providing a few minutes of totality.



Spectacular.

I like the fact that you can see planets in the daytime, for example Mercury as shown in this video. I for one have never seen Mercury directly before.

It is also interesting to see that while at totality, the surrounding horizon is still lit by the Sun, so it's sort of like a weird sunset all around them - except that the Sun is still straight up in the sky!

Pity that in the middle of the sea there aren't birds to sing their mis-timed evening song, which often occurs when totality happens over land.