Watch Thursday’s ‘ring of fire’ solar eclipse live-streamed

Live video of Thursday’s solar eclipse will be streaming on latimes.com beginning at 2:30 p.m. PDT.

The video is courtesy of Slooh Space Camera, which has several telescopes around the world, and which often live-streams celestial events.

On Thursday, the Slooh team will be streaming from a telescope in Australia, where the full eclipse should be visible -- weather permitting.

PHOTOS: Amazing images from space

In a perfect world, you would just go outside with special sun-gazing glasses and see this event for yourself, but unless you live in the South Pacific, you are out of luck.

The path of this eclipse sweeps inconveniently through some of the most remote regions on Earth.

Thursday’s eclipse is a special one. The moon is near apogee -- the point in its orbit when it is most distant from Earth. Because it is further away than usual, it also appears smaller in the sky than usual.

So Thursday afternoon, when the Earth, moon and sun line up so that the moon is directly between the Earth and sun, the moon will actually appear too small to cover the sun entirely.

Instead, the moon will block out the center of the sun, leaving a round halo of sunlight called an annulus or “ring of fire.” It is kind of like what happens when you put a penny on top of a nickel.

The eclipse as seen from Australia will last for just a few minutes, but it should be beautiful.