Doha: Qatar will witness a partial solar eclipse for 33 minutes this evening.
The eclipse will be visible from 4.19pm until 4.52pm, but people have been warned against looking directly at the eclipsed sun.
People could, however, watch the celestial spectacle, the last of this year, using a welder’s glass or indirectly with a pinhole filter.
The solar eclipse will sweep across parts of Africa, Europe, and the US as the moon will block the sun fully or partially.
In Qatar, the eclipse will be 37 percent, which means the moon will shadow a little more than a third of the sun.
“Qatari skies will witness partial solar eclipse. It will be 37 percent,” said prominent Qatari astronomer Sheikh Salman bin Jabor Al Thani (pictured).
“This will be the last solar eclipse of the year.”
The eclipse will be total only along a narrow path crossing the Atlantic Ocean and equatorial Africa (and it’s annular for the first tiny bit on the Atlantic).
A much larger part of the world will see a partial eclipse, including most of Africa, the Middle East, southernmost Europe, northern South America and the Caribbean. From the Eastern US and Canada, the viewing will be tricky but potentially spectacular. The greatest part of the eclipse will take place at 1237 GMT over the Atlantic Ocean, some 330km southwest of Liberia, according to experts.
The west African nation of Gabon will get peak viewing of the total eclipse as it sweeps over a path nearly 60km wide. At its peak over land in central Gabon around 1350 GMT, the sun will be blocked out for about a minute.
Experts say the safe way to view an eclipse is by making a pinhole camera, a three millimetre hole in one piece of paper, then turning the back to the sun and using the pierced page to project the image of the sun on another sheet of paper. The Peninsula
