(Partial) Darkness At Noon

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

December 25, 2000 / 12:35 PM EST / CBS

Holiday revelers who looked skyward Monday saw not Santa's sleigh but the first partial solar eclipse visible from North America on Christmas Day since 1628, reports CBS News Correspondent Anthony Mason.

The event occurred as the moon slid between the Earth and the sun, starting in the late morning on the East Coast and around sunrise in California. The moon appeared to take a bite out of the sun.

At the peak of the eclipse, 12:23 p.m. ET, about 72 percent of the sun was covered, as seen from Baffin Island in Canada's far north. In the U.S. Northeast, 60 percent of the sun was blocked. Residents of the U.S. Southwest were to see just 20 percent coverage.

Bits of it were also visible in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the North Atlantic, said Fred Espenak, an eclipse expert at the National Aeronautic and Space Administration's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Visitors get a preview of the Christmas elipse at New York's Hayden Planetarium.

Scientists warned against staring directly at the sun with the naked eye during the rare Christmas cosmic ballet, citing the danger of permanent retinal damage.

The sky show aside, many people who ventured outside to watch could have used every ray of sunlight they could get in frigid temperatures and fierce winds.

The next Christmas solar eclipse will occur in the year 2307, and will be visible off the coast of Africa, according to a calculation on www.space.com, a Web site tracking the 2000 Christmas eclipse.

Solar eclipses occur only at new moon. Such events often seal young people's decision to go into astronomy as a career, said Jack Horkheimer of the Miami Planetarium speaking on CNN.

Details of the times, duration and location of the eclipse, as well as other background material, is available at Duncan's University of Chicago Web site astro.uchigo.edu/duncan/.