Advantage goes to Europe for millennium's last eclipse

Image of the sun taken Friday by NASA's sun-observing SOHO observatory. SOHO will observe the sun during Wednesday's eclipse  Eclipse explainer: A solar eclipse occurs when the moon blocks the sun's light from an area of the Earth. The Earth and moon shine only by the reflected light of the sun, and both cast a shadow into space away from the sun. This shadow consists of a cone-shaped area of complete darkness, the umbra, and a larger area of partial darkness that surrounds the umbra, the penumbra. A solar eclipse is total or partial depending on where the umbra or the penumbra of the moon's shadow is viewed from the Earth. Source: Concise Columbia Encyclopedia VIDEO CNN's Rosemary Church reports on the European advantage in viewing the last total solar eclipse of the millennium Windows Media 28K 80K

In this story: Astronomers, spacecraft, holidays and hippies Meanwhile, back in America and cyberspace RELATED STORIES, SITES

August 6, 1999
Web posted at: 5:09 p.m. EDT (2109 GMT)

By Robin Lloyd
CNN Interactive Senior Writer

(CNN) -- While most Americans will have to settle for live Webcasts of Wednesday's total solar eclipse, Europeans find themselves in the celestial catbird seat, with ideal geographic positioning for the last such event of the millennium.

Preparations for the eclipse already have reached a fever pitch in parts of Europe and the Middle East, with 4,000 astronomers set to gather in northern France, the Lebanese government giving schoolchildren the day off and British police already overwhelmed by the "Cornwall crush."

"The next opportunity for a solar eclipse is 2081 for this part of the Earth so it's something which is attracting quite a lot of interest," said European Space Agency spokesman Franco Bonacina.

"Lots of people are moving to this band which stretches from the tip of Cornwall and comes through Belgium, covering a good part of Belgium and France, then going to Germany and then it will go through Austria and Hungary."

North Americans will have to wait until August 21, 2017, for the next total solar eclipse, which will track from Washington state to the Carolinas.

Total solar eclipses occur every 18 months due to a curious geo-spatial coincidence -- our moon, despite being much closer to Earth than the sun, is just the right size to obscure our blazing star when the two are in alignment from any particular point on the Earth.

The period when the sun is totally hidden by the moon at any given point along the route is only two and a half minutes or less, with the eclipse shadow racing across the planet in a 167-mile-wide swath at 1,800 km/h (1,100 mph) at the equator and up to 8,000 km/h (5,000 mph) near the poles.

But the ecliptic shadows generally sweep over oceans, sometimes only grazing land masses or missing those that are densely populated. At any given location on Earth, a total eclipse happens only once every 360 years.

And eclipses are shy, making themselves known only when the sun is more than 90 percent obscured by the moon. At 99 percent coverage, daylight effectively turns to twilight.

Wednesday's eclipse is rare because it will track mainly across highly populated land masses, starting in the Atlantic Ocean before crossing central Europe, the Middle East and India and ending in the Bay of Bengal.

A far less spectacular partial eclipse will be visible due to the moon's outer shadow passing across northeastern North America, all of Europe, northern Africa and western Asia.

Astronomers, spacecraft, holidays and hippies

Cornwall, the only part of Britain where next week's eclipse will be a total blackout, is worried that its big day will be marred by an invasion of post-modern hippies and New Age travelers.

The county in the far southwest of England expects as many as 1.5 million visitors along its twisting roads and ragged coastline.

New Age travelers, nomads and other post-modern hippie groups already have started descending on the county, attracted by as much its rich Celtic history as by the eclipse.

The British government warned Friday against unnecessary journeys to Cornwall.

In northern France, 4,000 members of a French astronomical association will gather to observe the event. The European Space Agency also has set up observation sites for the public in Germany, Romania and on the border of Austria and Hungary

The sun-observing SOHO observatory, a joint NASA and ESA mission, will observe the sun during the eclipse, although the spacecraft's will not "see" the eclipse itself. NASA plans to combine SOHO data with an audio eclipse experiment involving ham radio operators from around the world in a study aimed at better understanding atmospheric radio interference.

Lebanese government employees will work a half-day and all school students will take the day off Wednesday, according to the TerraNet Web site. Curiously, the Lebanese government said the move was aimed at protecting citizens' eyes from the potentially blinding rays of the eclipsed sun

Jordan and Syria have declared August 11th a national holiday and have active government campaigns for eye safety related to the eclipse, according to the BBC.

Syrian television bulletins warned viewers to remain indoors during the eclipse.

The French health ministry has banned the sale of protective glasses made in Colombia, as they claim they offer inadequate eye protection.

But the main European eclipse hazard could be traffic jams. Luckily, the event falls during a time when many Europeans are on holiday at resort areas in southern France, Spain and Italy. The hope is that the majority will want to remain in their luxurious settings and decide against driving north to see the eclipse.

The traffic is expected to be less troublesome than the annual exodus that occurs on August 1 and repeats on August 15 when as many as 18 million Europeans start their holidays and get in their cars, Bonacina said.

Meanwhile, back in America and cyberspace

Hundreds of professional and amateur U.S. astronomers already are en route to Europe to watch the moon swallow the sun one more time this century.

"I think the professional astronomers are always willing to travel no matter how far away it is," said Bruce Goldstein, a solar astronomer who helps run a NASA probe that studies the sun.

Other U.S. astronomers will stay home to monitor data that only can be collected during eclipses. When the moon blacks out the sun's main disk, this provides rare views of the sun's outer layer of gas, called the corona, as well as dust clouds that surround the sun and regularly are obscured by the star's brilliant light.

For the rest of us without plane tickets, spacecraft and observatories, the best view of the total eclipse in the United States will be on TV or the Web. Looking directly at an eclipse can damage your eyes anyway. But cameras can safely capture the image of the moon passing between the Earth and the sun.

This last total solar eclipse of the 1900s is notable for being the first to get extensive live coverage on the Internet, and eclipse fanatics have several choices.

A nonprofit group in Japan will offer live Webcasts of the eclipse at www.solar-eclipse.org, which will carry video images from seven observation points from England to Iran, starting at 4 a.m. EDT and lasting about three hours.

NASA will offer several real-time audio and video images related to the eclipse at http://eclipse99.nasa.gov

The European Space Agency's Web site also will offer real-time eclipse and SOHO images, updated every 10 minutes at www.esa.int.

As for Europe's live viewing advantage, ESA's Bonacina took a diplomatic attitude typical of many Europeans, saying it was "a pity" that the eclipse's shadow would fail to grace the United States.

"It's just sheer luck that it happens at the end of the century here and not in the States," he said.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.