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 People cheered and clapped as the moon blocked the sun for about
2.5 minutes under clear skies on the icy Norwegian islands of
Svalbard, where tourists had been warned of polar bears after an
attack on Thursday and risks of frostbite.
But clouds masked the sky over Torshavn, the capital of the Faroe
Islands further south, the only other place where the eclipse was
visible from land as it swept across the Atlantic.
"It was overcast, there was rain and wind. You could see nothing. It
was a disappointment for everybody," said Gabor Lantos, a Hungarian
tourist in Torshavn.
"Some tourists were so irritated, they argued with tour operators,
demanding their money back," he said, adding that would be
impossible.
In Svalbard, a polar bear mauled a Czech tourist on Thursday,
breaking into his tent as he slept. Jakub Moravev, flown by
helicopter to hospital, escaped with slight injuries to his face,
chest and an arm.
 The Faroe Islands expected about 8,000 visitors on top of the
island's 50,000 population for the first eclipse in the region in 60
years. About 2,000 people have made the trek to Svalbard, doubling
the population. "I've seen aurora, I've seen some volcano eruptions, but the total
eclipse is still the most spectacular thing I've ever seen. And each
one is unique," said Fred Espenak, a retired NASA astrophysicist in
Torshavn.
In an eclipse, when skies are clear, stars and planets are suddenly
visible in daytime and a ring of fire - the corona - appears around
the sun.
In one famous experiment, a 1919 eclipse gave evidence for
Einstein's theory of relativity by showing that the sun's mass bent
light from distant stars.
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"STRANGE LIGHT"
The small audience on Friday contrasted with tens of millions of
people who saw the last major eclipse in Europe in 1999. A partial
eclipse was visible on Friday mainly in Europe and Russia, and it
skimmed parts of north Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
"It's a very strange light, really spectacular, but I expected it to
be much darker, like in the evening," said Per Andersen, a Norwegian
businessman who watched the eclipse in Oslo where the moon covered
almost all the sun.
Twitter was dominated by the eclipse, with seven of the top 10
trending terms related to the sun and moon in Germany. And the
German word for "doomsday" was the ninth most popular topic.
The eclipse curbed solar power production in Europe, posing a
challenge to electricity grids.
Germany, Europe's biggest economy, boasts the world's biggest solar
powered installations, which last year supplied 6 percent of its
national power needs.
(With reporting by Vera Eckert in Frankfurt, Eric Auchard in Berlin,
Nerijus Adomaitis and Balazs Koranyi in Oslo, Writing by Alister
Doyle,; Editing by Gareth Jones)
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