Does solar eclipse occur every year?
On average, there are a couple of solar eclipses every year. Some are annular (the Moon is smaller than the Sun and doesn’t cover it completely), some are partial (only part of the Sun covered), some in really out-of-the-way parts of the world, like Antarctica. I’d say that there was a really good eclipse (a total eclipse in an accessible location) every couple of years. Dedicated eclipse chasers must be prepared to travel, since serious eclipse observers are really only interested in total eclipses, and these occur in very limited strips across the Earth, such as yesterday’s eclipse. It had one of the widest paths possible, 275 km. The path began on the west coast of India, diagonally across India into the highlands between India and China, across southern China and the out into the Pacific, hitting only a few islands on the rest of its journey. The next major eclipse in North America is in 2017. Here the path is only 115 km wide starting in northern Oregon and sweeping diagonally acr
