Thousands of people cheered or knelt in prayer as a total eclipse of the sun plunged Indonesia into darkness.
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The sun then went entirely dark in a broad arc right across the country, to the eastern Maluku Islands, before the eclipse swept out across the Pacific Ocean.
Partial eclipses will be visible in northern Australia and parts of Southeast Asia.
“It s an extraordinary spectacle that only takes place about once a year in one part of the world”, said Arnaud Fischer, a 33-year-old French tourist, who has witnessed several eclipses and was set to watch Wednesday s in Ternate.
Thousands of eclipse-chasers have come from overseas.
NASA had sent a team of scientists to Indonesia, where researchers documented the total solar eclipse for an experiment aimed at measuring a certain kind of light scattered by electrons in the lower corona.
By local clocks, in western Indonesia, the Moon will begin creeping across the disk of the Sun starting at around 6:20 a.m. and will completely leave the disk of the Sun around two hours later, peaking about an hour into the eclipse (at ~7:30 a.m. WIB). The last eclipse happened in Singapore in January, 2009 and the next solar eclipse, an annular one, will o… The eclipse was seen in other Asian countries such as Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia.
A solar eclipse is seen from Palembang, South Sumatra province, Indonesia March 9, 2016. (Photo: AFP/Manan Vatsyayana)The eclipse seen at about 8.30am, with about 90 per cent of the sun covered.
A partial solar eclipse is seen from Dhaka, Bangladesh, Wednesday, March 9, 2016. Hundreds of others prayed at nearby mosques.
Experts say the total eclipse can be viewed with the naked eye but special filters should be used during its partial phases. On August 21, 2017, just over 17 months from now, a similar total solar eclipse will pass directly over the United States.
But the total eclipse was only briefly visible if at all due to cloud.
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Wright reported from Jakarta.
