For close to a minute on Thursday, parts of Australia went dark as the Sun was blocked out by the Moon in the country's first solar eclipse of 2023.

The rare, hybrid solar eclipse was only visible as a totality from a few cities in southeast Asia and Western Australia, but was watched by tens of thousands of people around the world via livestreams (including a few ScienceAlert staff based in Australia, who had views of the partial eclipse through a veil of drifting clouds in Melbourne and Sydney).

A total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes in front of the Sun, their alignment and scale so perfect it plunges the landscape below into an eerie darkness. For a few brief moments, all that can be seen of our parent star are the wisps of its white corona peeking shyly around the Moon's disc.

During an annular eclipse, on the other hand, the relative size of the Moon against the Sun permits a blazing ring of light to encircle the darkness.

In this case, the event was a rare hybrid total annular solar eclipse, in which the Moon's shadow touched down on one part of the eclipse track and then lifted off again as the eclipse progressed from annular to totality and back to annular again.

Photos of this rare event are now starting to flood social media, and we can't stop staring at them.

Feast your eyes on some of the images and footage of the eclipse, and take it as a timely reminder that we're all spinning on a tiny cog in a giant Solar System.

Here's the moment of totality captured by the Perth Observatory and timeanddate.com for NASA's livestream.

total solar eclipse
The Sun's corona visible around the Moon at totality. You can see solar filaments projecting out of the corona. (timeanddate/PerthObservatory via NASA)

And some amazing moments captured by other observers.

The video below demonstrates a quick and easy way to safely view an eclipse – with a pinhole camera.

And just for a change of perspective, here's more of a Moon's eye view – with an Australian weather satellite showing the darkness spread across the western expanse of Australia.

Happy sky watching!