Pacific Total Eclipse Arcs - Solar Eclipse drew a 11 000-kilometer (6.800 mil) arc over the Pacific Sunday and put the remote areas in the dark, but drawing thousands of curious tourists and their dollars. The sky turned black in the middle of the daymoonslipped overSunand adapted to earth, blotting out the sun that just moments earlier had swept the island's quiet, ancient stone guardians. Applause erupted from the thousands of stargazers who started collecting days ago in this remote Chilean outpost of the rare four minutes, 41 secondseclipse. "It was like being on stage at night with artificial light. It was like being in a dark room with a 10-watt light bulb, 'awe-beating local official told AFP Haoa Francisco. "It started with a shadow. The sky was perfectly blue, with lots of wind that chased away the clouds. All applauded. "We saw a shining object near here and people started saying they were sure it was a UFO." On Tahiti, where the eclipse began his walk, the effect was so great that lots of football-mad Polynesians turned away from the World Cup final on their television screens to see the clouds instead.
"It was like the sun smiled,"said eight-year-old Hinanui."The Sun felt like a horizontal half-moon, the moon hidden bottom of the sun, which came back again as a crescent. "
Opticians and pharmacies sold more than 120 000 pairs goggles in Tahiti, which has 260 000 inhabitants, and warned of the dangers of vision loss on people watched the eclipse directly. Beginning at 1815 GMT, when the umbra or shadow fell about 700 km (440 miles) southeast of Tonga, the zipped eclipse in eastern arc, cloaking Easter Island at 2011 GMT. It ended with a pass in southern Chile and Argentina, where it left off at 2052 GMT, just before the evening in Patagonia.
