14 November, 2012 7:56AM AEST

Day turns to night eclipsing expectations

North Queensland plunged into darkness early on Wednesday as people from across the globe witnessed a rare cosmic event: a total solar eclipse.

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Thousands of people from across the globe watched the Australian sky on Wednesday morning to catch a glimpse of the rare eclipse.

In north Queensland the moon inched toward completely blotting out the sun slowly from 5:45am AEST.

At approximately 6:38am AEST parts of north Queensland were plunged into complete darkness for two minutes.

An estimated 60,000 scientists, astronomers and umbraphiles (eclipse chasers) set up in north Queensland to witness the eclipse, with many more watching a partial eclipse from other parts of Australia.

People have sent in photos from across Queensland of their view of the eclipse, while on social media thousands of tweets using the #cairnseclipse and #eclipse2012 hash tags.

Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium Curator Mark Rigby says a total solar eclipse is so rare that Australia won't experience totality, the brief period where the moon moves directly in front of the sun completely blocking it from view, again until 2028.

He says they will become more rare into the future.

"This event was set into motion over 4.5 million years ago. We're at this point in history where we can see a total...in over 600 million years we won't have any more total solar eclipses, because the moon drifts away about 38 millimetres a year and eventually it will be too far away to totally eclipse the sun."

A staff observer at the Australian Astronomical Observatory in Sydney, Dr Stuart Ryder says it's only by chance that eclipses even happen.

"It's such a perfect coincidence that although the sun is 400 times bigger than the moon it's also 400 times further away."

The phenomenon is created because the sun's 864,000-mile diameter is exactly 400 times greater than that of our moon, which measures in at just 2,160 miles. But the moon also happens to be about 400 times closer to the sun than the Earth and as a result , when the orbital planes meet and the distances align favourably, the new moon can appear to completely block out the sun.

"So there's this amazing coincidence in the relative sizes of the sun and the moon," Dr Ryder says, and "every now and then when they all line up, we get this magical phenomenon."

Most parts of Queensland witnessed a partial eclipse of more than 80 per cent.

The Redlands Astonomical Society astronomer Jeremy Price viewed the eclipse from the LOTA park foreshore with a crowd of interested onlookers.

He says 60 people viewed the partial eclipse without any cloud cover.

"We had about 60 people having a look through binoculars, glasses and telescopes."

"Its good to see people go wow, even when the eclipse has just started, because they've looked at the sun before."

ABC Science has compiled a full list of places which experienced the eclipse in Australia.

Don't look directly at the sun

Professionals warned those viewing the eclipse not to do so with the naked eye.

The Australian Society of Opthamologists' Doctor Ian Reddie says you should never look directly at the sun even during an eclipse when the sun seems less bright.

"There is no completely safe way to directly view an eclipse... whether using glasses or a camera or welding goggles or anything like that" he says.

Dr Reddie says even a few seconds of direct sun exposure can cause irreversible damage to the retina known as solar retinopathy.

"Most of us have probably used a magnifying glass at some point with the sun to start a fire and that's effectively what you are doing to the back of your eye if you look directly at the sun."