Grey skies mar view in 2011’s first solar eclipse

AFP/London

A seagull is silhouetted against the sun at dawn during a partial solar eclipse on Guadalmar beach in Malaga, Spain

In London, Paris and Rome, hopes for a spooky darkening of the winter skies at sunrise were dashed by dense cloud which turned the event into a grey mush.

“Aaah so much hype of an eclipse ... all I saw was the usual British cloud!!!” said Twitter contributor Romana Alli in Britain.

Sweden, especially the north of the country, had been predicted to be one of the best places to see the natural phenomenon, with the Sun being eclipsed by more than 80% in some areas, according to Goeran Olofsson, a professor of astronomy at the Stockholm observatory.

But astronomy blogs reported that northern areas were also hit by cloud.

In the Swedish capital, however, there was a better view.

Rising over Stockholm’s snow-covered roofs, the crescent Sun emerged from the haze, before gradually shaking off the Moon’s shadow, an AFP reporter saw.

“This was actually the best partial solar eclipse I have seen. Talk about drama. What a spectrum. It was brilliant,” Nils Erik Olsson, head of Stockholm’s amateur astronomy association told the TT news agency.

“We were maximally lucky.... That there were clouds around the Sun in the beginning only increased the drama,” he said.

“The Sun looks like a brightly shining moon crescent,” added Bjoern Haglund in Stockholm on Twitter.

In Stockholm, the show turned the Sun into a crescent from about 0712 to 0956 GMT, with the clearest view emerging at around 0830 GMT.

Yesterday’s partial eclipse occurred when a fraction of the Moon obscured the Sun, making it seem – in clear skies – as if a bite had been taken out of the solar face.

Star-gazers enjoyed the spectacle in southern Spain and Israel, where several observatories ran live webcasts using telescopes fitted with special filters.

In London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Berlin, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the Sun was covered at the eclipse’s peak.

In the Middle East, the Sun was almost half-obscured when seen from Beirut, Jerusalem and Amman, but more than 60% could be seen from towns in Turkey, according to calculations by veteran eclipse-watcher Fred Espenak.

Clouds and falling snow masked views of the eclipse for most residents of Russia and Central Asia, where the Sun was obscured by up to 84% in some areas.

In Moscow, where the eclipse covered up to 81% of the Sun, hazy clouds masked the Sun in some areas, but enthusiasts gathered to view the eclipse from the Sparrow Hills viewpoint.

Eclipse-watchers have had an unusually bumper year, according to Nasa, which counts two partial solar and two total eclipses in 2011.

The next partial solar eclipse will be on June 1, visible in parts of eastern Siberia, northern China, Alaska and northern Canada.

Total solar eclipses occur when the Sun, Moon and Earth are all perfectly in line.

The Sun is 400 times wider than the Moon, but it is also 400 times farther away, which means the lunar shadow, or umbra, is just wide enough to cover the face of the Sun.

The last total solar eclipse was on July 11 2010, crossing the Southern Pacific.

The next will be on November 13 2012, crossing parts of Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific and South America, says Espenak.