Annular Solar Eclipse
Annular Solar Eclipse: - Solar eclipses occur when the Sun, Moon and Earth are aligned in a straight line, so that the Moon passes between us and the Sun and blocks its light. The Moon's shadow can be divided into the umbra , indicated as a dark gray cone, where the Moon appears to completely cover the Sun, and the larger penumbra , where the Moon only partially covers the Sun. The umbra gets narrower at greater distances from the Moon, since the Moon covers less of the sky when seen from greater distances, and so needs to be more precisely aligned in order to cover the entire Sun. At a distance of 373,000 km, the Moon appears with exactly the same angular size as the Sun, and so the umbra narrows to a single point where the two objects are perfectly aligned in the sky. In the diagram to the right, the grid represents the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. As it circles the Earth, the Moon passes through this Earth–Sun plane twice each month, at the points on...