Solar eclipse of May 20, 2012

Solar eclipse of May 20, 2012
Composite image taken from Red Bluff, California
Map
Type of eclipse
Nature	Annular
Gamma	0.4828
Magnitude	0.9439
Maximum eclipse
Duration	346 s (5 min 46 s)
Coordinates	49°06′N 176°18′E / 49.1°N 176.3°E / 49.1; 176.3
Max. width of band	237 km (147 mi)
Times (UTC)
(P1) Partial begin	20:56:07
(U1) Total begin	22:06:17
Greatest eclipse	23:53:54
(U4) Total end	1:39:11
(P4) Partial end	2:49:21
References
Saros	128 (58 of 73)
Catalog # (SE5000)	9535

An annular solar eclipse occurred at the Moon’s descending node of orbit between Sunday, May 20 and Monday, May 21, 2012,^[1][2][3] with a magnitude of 0.9439. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partly obscuring the image of the Sun for a viewer on Earth. An annular solar eclipse occurs when the Moon's apparent diameter is smaller than the Sun's, blocking most of the Sun's light and causing the Sun to look like an annulus (ring). An annular eclipse appears as a partial eclipse over a region of the Earth thousands of kilometres or miles wide. Occurring about 1.3 days after apogee (on May 19, 2012, at 17:10 UTC), the Moon's apparent diameter was smaller.^[4]

The annular eclipse was the first visible from the contiguous United States since the solar eclipse of May 10, 1994 (Saros 128), and the first in Asia since the solar eclipse of January 15, 2010 (Saros 141).^[5] The path of the eclipse's antumbra included heavily populated regions of China and Japan, and an estimated 100 million people in those areas were capable of viewing annularity. In the western United States, its path included 8 states, and an estimated 6 million people were capable of viewing annularity.

The eclipse was visible in a band spanning through East Asia, the Pacific Ocean, and North America. As a partial solar eclipse, it was visible from Greenland to Hawaii, and from eastern Indonesia at sunrise to western North America at sunset.