In Melbourne, the eclipse will be cut short by the Moon setting (and the Sun rising) before it ends, but (weather permitting) one should be able to see it almost at its maximum. The umbral eclipse will start at 5:35am on Sunday (19:35 UTC on Saturday) and the maximum eclipse happens at 7:10am; infuriatingly, the Sun will rise at 7:02am and the Moon will set at 7:04am… but, if you live further west, you get to see more of it, and observers in Perth get to see the full umbral eclipse.

Still, if the weather is good and you can get a good, unobstructed view of the western horizon and you can get yourself out of bed at 5:30am on a Sunday, it will be a good show. If the weather is not that good, you can check a live webcast of the eclipse (as seen from Birmingham, UK) at the Lunar Observers website — assuming the weather there is good, of course.

The event of this year will be visible in the far north of Canada, the northern tip of Greenland and on a large swatch of Russia, Mongolia and China (yes, it does look like everything happens in China nowadays); also, almost all of Europe (except Portugal and Spain), most of Russia and China, all of the Middle East and India will see a partial eclipse. Totality will start in Nunavut, in Canada, at 19:21 Melbourne time (09:21 UTC), and end in northern China at 21:21 Melbourne Time (11:21 UTC).

As usual, NASA has a very detailed web page dedicated to the eclipse, including an embedded Google Map showing the path of totality and technical information for any given point. Plus, for those of us outside the path of the eclipse, NASA will also be broadcasting the event live from China starting at 20:00 Melbourne time (10:00 UTC) on Friday.

The next total eclipse will happen in July of 2009, but before that we’ll have a partial lunar eclipse on 16 August that will be partially visible from Australia. More details closer to the event.

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