Hybrid Solar Eclipse: April 8, 2005

Geographic Region: New Zealand, N. & S. America
[Hybrid: southern Pacific Ocean, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela]

The first solar eclipse of 2005 is of an uncommon type known as either annular-total or hybrid. This is a unique class of central eclipse where some sections of the path are annular while other parts are total.

The eclipse will be visible from within a thin corridor, which traverses the Southern Hemisphere.The path of the Moon's shadow begins southeast of New Zealand and stretches across the Pacific Ocean to Panama, Columbia, and Venezuela. A partial eclipse will be seen within the much broader path of the Moon's penumbral shadow, which includes New Zealand, much of the South Pacific, South and North America.

The central eclipse track begins at 18:54 UT as a 28 kilometre wide annular path with a duration of 28 seconds. However, the path quickly narrows to 0 kilometres within the first 13 minutes of its trajectory some 2200 kilometres south of Tahiti. Continuing along its northeastern course, the path is now total as it rapidly expands in width. Unfortunately, no Pacific islands of any size fall within the path of totality. At 19:48 UT, the umbral shadow passes north and just grazes Oeno Island (near Pitcarn). The 21 kilometre wide path now has a central duration of 31 seconds with the Sun 56° above the horizon.

At greatest eclipse (20:35:46 UT), the duration of totality is 42 seconds and the path width is 27 kilometres. As the shadow proceeds along its watery trajectory, the path begins to narrow as the length of totality decreases. The path becomes annular again at 22:00 UT about 800 kilometres due north of the Galapagos Islands and 900 kilometres west of Central America. By the time the shadow reaches the coast of Costa Rica (22:09 UT), the annular phase will already be 12 seconds and growing. The track width increases from 11 to 33 kilometres as it sweeps across Panama, Columbia, and Venezuela. Finally the central path ends in Venezuela where a 33 seconds annular eclipse will occur at sunset (22:18 UT). Over the course of 3 hours and 24 minutes, the Moon's central shadow traverses a 14,200 kilometre long track covering a scant 0.06% of the Earth's surface area.

Local circumstances for a number of cities are given in Table 2A-2DAll times are provided in Universal Time. Sun's altitude and azimuth, the eclipse magnitude[3] and obscuration[4 are all listed for the instant of maximum eclipse.

Eclipse map and predictions courtesy of Fred Espenak - NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.
For more information on solar and lunar eclipses, see Fred Espenak's Eclipse Home Page:

http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/eclipse.html