Today marked a special day for astronomy in Malaysia as an annular solar eclipse is making a return to our country after it was last observed in our country 21 years. The rare phenomena which is also known the “ring of fire” eclipse takes place when the Sun and Moon are exactly in line with the Earth.
However, the annular solar eclipse can only be observed in several locations in Malaysia including at Tanjung Piai in Johor which geographically is the most southern point of mainland Asia. Planetarium Negara has set up a live stream for everyone to follow the progress of the annular solar eclipse directly from Tanjung Piai, complete with sound guidance for the visually-challenged:
For those in East Malaysia, they can also observe it in Sarawak at cities such as Serian and Sri Aman. Meanwhile, partial solar eclipse can also be observed throughout the country for the next few hours.
Planetarium Negara has provided this handy map which generally showed the peak timing for both annular and partial solar eclipse in Malaysia today:
Folks in Kuala Lumpur can also check out the partial solar eclipse through specialized tools on-site at Planetarium Negara. In case you are not aware of this, you should not look directly at the sun even using your camera, phones, or homemade filters as solar eclipse should only be observed using proper solar filters and viewers.
If you don’t have access to those specialized tools, you can try using this pinhole projection method with your own hand or quickly build a simple card/paper pinhole projector using this method. With that, enjoy the eclipse!
(Source: Planetarium Negara – 1, 2. Image: NASA/Hinode/XRT.)
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