An annular solar eclipse occurred on December 26, 2019. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partly obscuring 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 wide. The annularity was visible in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam. Population centers in the path of the annularity included Kozhikode, Coimbatore, Jaffna, Trincomalee, Sibolga, Tanjung Pinang, Batam, Singapore, Singkawang and Guam. Cities such as Doha, Madurai, Pekanbaru, Dumai, Johor Bahru and Kuching narrowly missed the annular path.
Solar coronal magnetic fields play a key role in driving the space weather conditions. Direct observations of coronal magnetic fields is challenging. Such solar eclipse events present an outstanding opportunity for the scientists to constrain the theoretical models via observations. The magnetic field structure for this annular eclipse is predicted using a combination of data-constrained models. Prediction results can be found here. It was the last solar eclipse of 2019. The central path of the 2019 annular eclipse passed through Saudi Arabian Peninsula, southern India, Sumatra, Borneo, Philippines and Guam. A partial eclipse was visible thousands of kilometers wide from the central path. It covered small parts of Eastern Europe, much of Asia, North/West Australia, East in Africa, Pacific and Indian Ocean. The eclipse started with an antumbra having a magnitude of .96; it stretched 164 kilometers wide, and traveled towards the east at an average rate of 1.1 kilometer per second. The longest duration of annularity was 3 minutes and 40 seconds, at 5.30 UT1 occurring in South China Sea (0°45'54.0"N 105°29'06.0"E).
The eclipse began in Saudi Arabia about 220 kilometers northeast of Riyadh at 03:43 UT1 and ended in Guam at 06:59.4 UT1. It reached India near Kannur, Kerala, at 03:56 UT1. The shadow reached the southeast coast of India at 04:04 UT1. Traveling through northern Sri Lanka, it headed into the Bay of Bengal. The next main visible places were Palau (Malaysia), Sumatra and Singapore. It then passed through the South China Sea, crossed Borneo and the Celebes Sea, the Philippines archipelago and then headed towards the western Pacific. The antumbral shadow encountered Guam at 6:56 UT1 and rose back into space.
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