For one minute a total solar eclipse made the day as dark as night in the small and remote town of Exmouth, in northwest Australia, one of the few places in the world where the phenomenon could be seen in its fullness.
More than 20,000 people, according to the public channel ABC, traveled to this Exmouth, a small town of about 3,000 inhabitants located about 1,200 kilometers from Perth, with their telescopes, blankets and chairs to witness this event.
With clear skies, the culmination of the solar eclipse, which lasted about a minute, was observed in Exmouth at around 11:30 a.m. local time (3:30 GMT), according to a live broadcast from the Perth Observatory.
"It lasted about a minute but it felt longer," Henry Throop, a NASA astronomer who flew from the United States to Exmouth, told ABC.
This astronomical event "was so sharp and bright. You could see the corona" of the sun as it was covered by the moon, the American expert added with great enthusiasm.
For his part, a Belgian fan, who said he had witnessed 24 eclipses in his life, stressed that today's seemed "fantastic" because it allowed him to appreciate "the prominences of the chromosphere", that is, the thin layer of the Sun's atmosphere. , as he declared to ABC from Exmouth.
This eclipse, which occurs when the Sun, Moon, and Earth align so that the Moon covers the solar disk, caused the Moon to cast a shadow of about 40 kilometers across the Earth's surface.
While the solar eclipse observed at Exmouth was total, elsewhere in Australia, as well as Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and other Southeast Asian nations, observation of the event was mostly partial.
In Indonesia, hundreds of people watched the partial eclipse from the Jakarta Planetarium and on the island of Bali, while the total only occurred in four provinces in the east: Papua, West Papua, Maluccas and North Maluccas.
This rare astronomical phenomenon today was also part of a "mixed" or "hybrid" eclipse - a term referring to a solar eclipse that is part of the time annular and part of the time total.
"In some areas (of Australia) it will be an annular eclipse and the Moon will be surrounded by a bright ring. In other areas, like the Ningaloo coast, it will be a total eclipse and you will see the faint corona of the Sun's atmosphere," explained this week Mark Cheung, deputy director of space and astronomy at the Australian government science body CSIRO.
