A total solar eclipse occurred at the Moon's descending node of orbit on Thursday, February 26, 1998,[1] with a magnitude of 1.0441.

A total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon's apparent diameter is larger than the Sun's, blocking all direct sunlight, turning day into darkness.

Totality occurs in a narrow path across Earth's surface, with the partial solar eclipse visible over a surrounding region thousands of kilometres wide.

Occurring about 1.1 days before perigee (on February 27, 1998, at 19:50 UTC), the Moon's apparent diameter was larger.

[2] Totality was visible in the Galápagos Islands, Panama, Colombia, the Paraguaná Peninsula in northwestern Venezuela, all of Aruba, most of Curaçao and the northwestern tip of Bonaire (belonging to Netherlands Antilles which dissolved later), all of Montserrat, Guadeloupe and Antigua and Barbuda.

The team also photographed the corona using the same green filter onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, providing calibration for the spacecraft.

[3] Fred Espenak, an astrophysicist of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center also observed it in Aruba.

[5] The 2001 Japanese film Orozco the Embalmer briefly featured the total eclipse as seen from Colombia.

Their appearance and longitude are irregular due to a lack of synchronization with the anomalistic month (period of perigee).