(Click to enlarge) This image is of the solar eclipse earlier
this week. Solar eclipses occur when the moon comes between the
Earth and Sun. However, there's more to it than just that,
otherwise we'd have a solar eclipse every ~28 days (one full
lunar cycle). When viewed edge on, the plane in which the moon
orbits is slightly tilted in relation to the plane the Earth and
Sun lie on (hence the reason the shadow moves along a different
line in the sky than the sun, intersecting only at the one
point). Because of this, most of the time, when the moon is on
the line between the Warth and the Sun, it is simply too high or
too low to cause an eclipse. Sometimes it's between the point
where it's too high or low and the point where it will
completely come in front of the Sun. In this case, the moon will
only cover part of the Sun and the result will be a partial
ecplipse, such as this one I photographed in Spring 2005.
Additionally, the moon's orbit around the Earth is not perfectly
circular. It is slightly elliptica