Why the solar eclipse is only visible in certain areas of the earths surface?

Answer 1

No. At the full moon, you may (about once every 6 months or so) get a LUNAR eclipse.

Solar eclipses only happen at the new moon phase, again, about every 6 months.

You can see the catalog of all eclipses from 2000 BCE to 3000 AD on the NASA Eclipse Web Page at the link below.

Answer 2

no because all eclipse are not total go on NASA .com for more help

Answer 3

no

Answer 4

These parts of the Sun are so dim - compared to the brilliance of the Sun itself - that you can't see them when the Sun is visible. Block the Sun with the mass of the Moon, and THEN you'd be able to see the corona. But when the Sun is visible, nothing else around it is.

Answer 5

The moon is smaller than the earth, and the inner shadow ("umbra") is cone-shaped with the small end pointing away from the moon. By the time the shadow cone intersects the Earth, it can be a fairly small circle (it's even possible that the cone comes to a point before touching the Earth, in which case you get an annular eclipse: the moon blocks only the middle of the sun, and a narrow ring is visible all the way around it).

Answer 6

For an eclipse to occur requires that the Sun, Moon and Earth line up exactly, so that the shadow of the Moon falls on the Earth (a solar eclipse) or the shadow of the Earth falls on the Moon (a lunar eclipse). So solar eclipses can only occur at the new moon, and lunar eclipses always take place at full moons.

But the plane of the Moon's orbit is tilted; most of the time at a full or new moon, the Moon is above or below the line between the Earth and Moon. There are only two times per year when they line up.

When they do, the result it an eclipse.

For a lunar eclipse, the Earth's shadow is larger than the Moon, so the entire Moon is engulfed in the shadow, and the moon becomes dark. (Not QUITE dark; light from the Sun is refracted or "bent" around the curve of the Earth; red rays are bent more, giving us red sunrises and sunsets. During a lunar eclipse, the direct rays from the Sun cannot hit the Moon, because the Moon is in the Earth's shadow. But the red light bent through the Earth's atmosphere gives the lunar eclipse a ruddy glow - the glow of all the sunrises and sunsets around the world all at once.)

The Moon's shadow is fairly small; generally only a hundred miles or so across. So only a small part of the Earth is darkened by the solar eclipse.

And the Sun-Moon-Earth alignment is never PERFECTLY exact, so the exact place where the Moon's shadow hits the Earth is a little different each time.

In 1999, one of the astronauts aboard the Russian MIR space station took a picture of the Earth during a total solar eclipse. It's quite impressive; the bright Earth, with a big dark spot! See the link below for the picture.

Answer 7

The Sun is enormous; the Moon is fairly small. So the Moon's shadow is cone-shaped, narrowing to a point just about at the surface of the Earth. (When the Moon is farther away from Earth than normal, we get "annular" eclipses instead of total eclipses.)

So at best, only a small area of the Earth is at the "point" of that cone-shaped shadow.

Answer 8

The light from the Sun hits the Earth, and warms the Earth. Light that JUST BARELY MISSES the Earth, the light that hits the atmosphere and goes through back into space, is bent or refracted just a little bit. The light is bent down, toward ground, and red light is refracted more than blue light. That's why sunsets and sunrises look red; you're seeing light that's being bent AROUND the Earth, from below the horizon to your eyes.

That reddish light continues on into space. We don't normally notice it, because there isn't anything there to reflect the red light back to the Earth - until the Moon slips into the Earth's shadow. Then, during the totality of a total lunar eclipse, we discover that while the direct rays of the Sun are blocked by the Earth, the refracted red light - the light of all the surises and sunsets, all around the world, are bent AROUND the Earth and illuminate the Moon. And that's why during a total lunar eclipse, the Moon is a deep dark red.

Answer 9

The circular orbit of the moon around the earth is not exactly coplanar with the orbit of the earth around the sun. This means that typically when the moon goes by the sun in the sky, it comes close to it but not close enough to cover up any part of the sun in our view from Earth. When the moon passes by the sun in this manner, we don't see it, because the sun's light is so bright that the moon is completely obscured in the sky, and because in that situation the moon is a "new moon" (totally dark) and thus would not be visible anyway.

Answer 10

A total lunar eclipse (eclipse of the moon) is visible from the entire night side of the

earth ... every place on earth where the moon is in the sky ... and lasts for hours.

A total solar eclipse (eclipse of the sun) is visible from a band on the earth that's

several hundred miles wide, but only as a partial eclipse. Totality is visible only from

within a spot on the earth that's less than a hundred miles across, and for only a few

minutes before it moves on.