Many countries in the northern hemisphere got the opportunity to watch on Saturday the third and final solar eclipse for this year, two weeks after the longest lunar eclipse in the 21st century.
An eclipse occurs almost every 173 days during the so-called eclipse season, as the moon's orbit intersects twice a year with the sun's orbit for 34 days, causing the eclipse three times.
Before Saturday’s eclipse, the world witnessed two others on February 1 and July 13, all of which were invisible in the Arab world. The astronomical calculations of NASA indicate that the next eclipse will take place entirely on July 2, 2019, and will be seen in the Northern Pacific and South America.
According to the “space.com” website, the latest eclipse was observed in Greenland, Canada, Scotland, most Nordic countries (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland), Estonia, Latvia, most of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, China, North and South Korea.
It lasted for 3 hours and 28 minutes, and its visibility varied among the regions that witnessed it. However, the best observation site was in northern Russia, where the eclipse visibility rate reached 68 percent.
Dr. Mohamed Sadek, professor of Astronomy at the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics in Egypt, told Asharq Al-Awsat that the eclipse occurs at the end of the lunar month, when the moon is in the ‘New Moon phase’ and right before the birth of the new month’s crescent, then, the earth and the sun align.
In this case, the distance between the Moon and the Earth varies between 363,000 km and 405,000 km.
Sadek explains that this phenomenon serves in determining the beginning of the lunar months.
