For up to six minutes on July 22, 2009, people in China's Yangtze River Valley will get a glimpse of the longest total solar eclipse in 500 years. The eclipse will be visible in an area that includes several big cities and covers a total area 250 km wide and 10,000 km long.

It will begin between 9:00 AM and 9:38 AM in different regions of the country. People in the Tibet Autonomous Region will be the first to witness the natural phenomenon, while locals in Zhoushan, an island city in Zhejiang Province, will be the last to see it.

The solar eclipse is visible from within a narrow corridor that traverses half of the earth. The path of the moon's umbral shadow begins in India and crosses through Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and China. After leaving mainland Asia, the path crosses Japan's Ryukyu Islands and curves southeast through the Pacific Ocean, where the maximum duration of the eclipse reaches 6 minutes and 39 seconds. A partial eclipse will be seen within the much broader path of the moon's penumbral shadow, which includes most of eastern Asia, Indonesia and the Pacific Ocean.

(Beijing Planetarium, Xinhua News Agency July 21, 2009)