Shame. The last eclipse for 2010, a total lunar eclipse, to occur on the 21st of December will not be visible in the Maldives. The entire 72 minutes of totality will be visible for North America and parts of it visible to South America, UK, most European countries, East Asia and much of Australia.

The next earliest eclipse visible in the Maldives will be a total lunar eclipse occurring on 15 June 2011 with the penumbral phase beginning at 10:25PM. The next solar eclipse visible in the Maldives isn't due to occur until 2016.

More info on the 21st Dec eclipse:
- Eclipse event page at NASA
- Eclipse path and visibility

(I am a bit late in posting it here but...) I would like to convey a big thank you to all those who attended my recent lecture, "We, Machines" at the 6th edition of the Buraasfathivaru series, and the organisers "26". I hope the lecture imparted something of value and provided some food for thought.

At some point in your life, when you looked up at the night sky, chances are you spotted the unforgettable three bright stars in a line that make up the "belt" in the Orion constellation. It was the first constellation I learnt when I was a kid and started to grow a fascination towards the cosmos. Male' has too much light pollution to take a decent picture of the night sky so I took the chance to snap a shot of the constellation which stood out of the dark night canopy when I made a stopover at GA. Nilandhoo recently. Orion and Hyades are both distinctly visible in the picture.

The three stars which make up the Belt of Orion lie at different distances from the Earth despite appearing to be in the same line-of-sight. The reddish coloured star in the constellation is Betelgeuse (pronounced beetle-juice) and is one of the most brightest stars in the night sky. It is nearing the end of its life and is expected to be so bright when it explodes that it would be visible during the day!

Being a Maldivian, the thing that jumps out the most on the just recently released gravity model produced from the high resolution measurements of gravitational pull across the Earth, gathered by the European Space Agency's GOCE satellite, is that Maldives is located within a curious blob of colour - the only blob of that colour in the map. The colour blob, it turns out, signifies areas where the difference between the geoid (a hypothetical global mean sea level undisturbed by weather and currents) and the perfect ellipsoid shape that Earth approximates overall, sinks to its lowest of -100m!

Apart from that, this reaffirms that the gravitational pull experienced in the Maldives is lower than most places on Earth...

Mark January 15 on your calendar now because the longest annular solar eclipse we'd see for the next thousand years is set to take place on that day! Some islands of the Maldives, including Male', lie within its central track and will experience the eclipse for a lengthy 10 minutes and 45 seconds.

Here is a video of a simulation of the eclipse showing how exactly the eclipse is going to look in the Maldives. The simulation was rendered by the free and open-source planetarium software Stellarium using a custom script I wrote for Stellarium for the event. The script is up for download and can be added to your Stellarium installation by following the instructions on the Stellarium wiki.

More info:
- Eclipse information at NASA
- Article about the eclipse by the Maldives Science Society

I published a Dhivehi article over at Muraasil on the lunar eclipse to occur on the 31st of this month.

A partial lunar eclipse will occur on 31 December 2009, right before the new year rolls on, and is to be visible in the Maldives. This partial eclipse involves the Moon just barely passing through the Earth's umbral shadow and hence will be only very minor. You are likely to not notice the eclipse unless you are actively watching out for it.

The penumbral phase of the eclipse starts at 10:15 PM on 31 December 2009 and ends 2:30 AM on 1 January 2010, Maldivian time. The umbral phase, which you will see, starts 11:51 PM on 31 December 2009 and ends 12:55 AM on 1 January 2010, Maldivian time.

More details can be found at NASA's "Eclipses during 2009" page.