India to witness total solar eclipse on July 22

New Delhi, May 15: India will witness a major celestial event, a total solar eclipse, on July 22.

Many important cities are lined up along the Moon's shadow path. The totality begins soon after the sunrise in Surat and its duration increases as one moves along this roughly 200-km wide belt from West to East, Nehru Planetarium Director Piyush Pandey said in Mumbai today.

At Surat the totality lasts for 3 minutes 17 seconds and it increases to 4 minutes 20 seconds North of Dibrugarh, Pandey said using Eclipse Predictions of Fred Espenak, NASA's GSFC.

Taken the Earth as a whole, the greatest duration is in the Pacific Ocean South- East of Japan where the totality lasts for 6 minutes 39 seconds. July is a month full of rains. No one can predict with many level of confidence where you will have clear skies and no rain fall on July 22, Pandey said.

After analysing the weather pattern of the past 20 years it seems places like Patna, Varanasi and their neighbourhood offer better viewing prospects for eclipse enthusiasts, he added. Eclipse watchers from all over India and abroad have been planning for past several months for this long eclipse.

In Mumbai, the eclipse will be viewed as a partial event. Here, the Sun rises on that day at 6.12 am when the eclipse would have already begun.

At 6.22 am it would attain its greatest phase when 96 per cent of the Sun's diameter would be obscured by the Moon. Partial eclipse ends in Mumbai at 7.19 am.

The next total solar eclipse would be after 25 years on March 20, 2034. We would be able to witness it from Jammu and Kashmir a little before the sunset, he said, adding, that would be the last total solar eclipse of the century cutting across India. Sources