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Eclipse, 21 June 2001
The first total solar eclipse of this millennium - a spectacular show in clear skies - has been an African phenomenon, visible only from the Atlantic and Indian Oceans or from the southern African countries of Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and the island nation of Madagascar. During its three-hour sweep across the southern hemisphere, the eclipse has been tracked by spacecraft and photographed by land-based telescopes. Our special eclipse pages tell you how astrophysicists prepared for their data collection, what they try to learn from their observations, and what African media are saying about the event. |
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www.skypub.com Courtesy of Sky&Telescope Magazine |
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Spectacular Views, Cloudless Skies, and Telescopes Pointed the Right Direction It's more complicated than you might imagine to photograph a solar eclipse in a way that yields useful scientific data. But thanks to excellent weather, intensive planning, and sheer good fortune, observation teams came away from the Africa 2001 total eclipse with years worth of computer files to analyze. And that should take us a step closer to solving an enduring solar mystery. Live Eclipse Webcasts Followed the Path of Totality - or Didn't This century's first solar eclipse was heavily documented by international media and scientific institutions, with a number scheduling live webcasts of the event. But several major sites, including some we linked to from our site, had problems. CNN's live television coverage was dramatic, but its web links were broken; likewise the Adler Planetarium (Chicago, USA) link to its webcam in the Mozambique Channel. The BBC coverage from Lusaka had loading problems, as did Mercury Telecom's from Angola. But if you clicked on allAfrica's link to the Spanish-language site "Terra", you saw flawless live action from a web camera in Zimbabwe.
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Path of the Eclipse Sweeping across an 8000-mile-long path in just under 3 hours, a partial eclipse will appear first in southeast Uruguay. Inhabitants of the eastern coast of South America will experience this phenomenon at sunrise. In Africa, the lunar shadow will surface 200 miles south of Luanda, Angola and move eastward along a 1500-mile path across the continent, exiting less than an hour later from the central coast of Mozambique. The largest convergence of observers in Lusaka, Zambia will experience "totality" at approximately 3:09 p.m. local time. Total eclipses may be viewed only on the open ocean and in southern Africa. The next total eclipse will be visible over the continent on December 4, 2002. |
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