Solar eclipse began today and finished yesterday for Armenia – astronomer

The solar eclipse began today and finished yesterday for Armenia, Areg Mikaelyan, an Armenian astronomer, told reporters on Wednesday.

“It sounds strange, but there is a date changing line in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The time is a day past to its west and a day ahead to its east, so the end coincided with the past day. [The eclipse] began on [November] 14 in Australia and on November 13 on the islands of Chile,” he explained.

The next solar eclipse, the scholar said, is due on May 10, 2013. Later in the year (on November 3) the earth will see another eclipse, this time of a hybrid nature.

Mikaelyan said 2-5 eclipses occur annually in different parts of the planet, their rate for the same place being 360-400 for every ten years.

“The first solar eclipse occurred in 2800 B.C. It has been mentioned in different records – Chinese, Greece etc. They occurred in earlier periods too, but people began registering them from that era,” he added.

The astronomer said further that a partial solar eclipse, which was last observed March 2006, is due on June 21 2020.