Solar eclipse in Europe: If you slept through it, here’s what you missed

A total solar eclipse was viewable from a relatively tiny strip of Earth in the wee hours of Friday morning, but for for most of those on Earth, the show began at 1:30 a.m. when the astronomy website Slooh.com started to live stream images of the total eclipse from the Faroe Islands, a small archipelago that lies northwest of Scotland, between Norway and Iceland.

The broadcast, which you can replay below, lasted for several hours and the moment of total eclipse lasted just a couple minutes. You will also get to see the moon's shadow creeping across the face of the sun.

A solar eclipse occurs when the moon, sun and Earth line up in such a way that the moon obscures either part or all of the sun's bright disk.

A partial solar eclipse was also visible Friday in many European cities including London, Madrid, Paris, Munich and Oslo.

The total eclipse -- when the entirety of the sun's disk is covered by the moon -- was visible only from a strip 10,000 miles long and 100 miles wide that swept across the North Atlantic Ocean, the Norwegian Sea and the Arctic Ocean.

 This narrow strip is called the path of totality.

Although a total eclipse occurs about once every year or two, Bob Berman, an astronomer with Slooh, explains that the path of totality only falls on a particular place on Earth once every 360 years on average.

Sky-watching Americans will get their chance to see a total solar eclipse firsthand on Aug. 21, 2017, when the path of totality will sweep across the United States from Oregon to South Carolina.

It will be the first time that a total eclipse has been visible from mainland American soil since 1979.

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