Annular Solar Eclipse / Boxing Day, 26 December 2019

It was a very hot and humid morning today and I was sweating buckets while having lunch with Cass at a kopitiam. During my drive back home after lunch (around 1:30 p.m.), I noticed that the sky suddenly turned gloomy, as if a big blanket was put around the sun partially. We could still see the sun rays but it was eerily gloomy / dark; a color rarely seen in the sky. I commented to Cass that the sky looked very different today - sunny yet dark, all of sudden.  I didn't know that today is the annular eclipse and it would start from 11:20 a.m. through 3:15 p.m.

Minutes later, I received a Whatsapp message from Sherilyn with a picture of a crescent ring. Sherilyn and Alycia were out at Bangsar Shopping Center with the mil and visiting aunt and cousin from Hong Kong.  She had taken a picture of the annular solar eclipse using my old Huawei phone and she begged me to take out the DSLR camera to snap a picture of the eclipse. But the sun wasn't visible at my end and it was cloudy.  She rushed home and managed to snap a picture of the sun using the DSLR camera filtered by a film.


What is a Solar Eclipse?
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 of fire - picture below). An annular eclipse appears as a partial eclipse over a region of the Earth thousands of kilometres wide. The annularity is visible in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam.



Photo below was taken by Sherilyn, at a mall:



Photo below was taken by my friend in Singapore:



Did you manage to witness this rare phenomenon today? The last time it occurred was on 22 August 1998 and the next annular solar eclipse in Malaysia will be in 4163 days on Wednesday, 05/21/2031.