The duration of totality increases as one move along this roughly 200 km wide belt from the West to East, Nehru Planetarium Director Piyush Pandey said at New Delhi on Friday.

At Surat the totality lasts for 3 minutes 17 seconds and it increases to 4 minutes 20 seconds North of Dibrugarh, Pandey said using Eclipse Predictions of Fred Espenak, NASA's GSFC.
        
Taken the Earth as a whole the greatest duration is in the Pacific Ocean South-East of Japan where the totality lasts for 6 minutes 39 seconds.
        
July is a month full of rains. No one can predict with many level of confidence where you will have clear skies and no rain fall on  July 22.
        
After analysing the weather pattern of the past 20 years it seems places like Patna, Varanasi  and its neighbourhood offer better viewing prospects for eclipse enthusiasts, Pandey said.
         
Eclipse chasers from all over India and abroad have been planning for past several months for this long eclipse. In Mumbai the eclipse will be viewed as a partial event (Sun appearing like a bitten-off biscuit). Here the Sun rises on that day at 6:12 a.m. when the eclipse would have already begun.
       
At 6:22 it would attain its greatest phase when 96 per cent of the diameter of the Sun would be obscured by the Moon. Partial eclipse ends in Mumbai at 7:19 a.m.
       
If you miss this eclipse and do not wish to travel out of India for the next one then the opportunity comes your way 25 years later on 20 March 2034 when we shall witness a total solar eclipse from Jammu & Kashmir a little before the sunset,  he said adding that would be the last total solar eclipse of the century cutting across India.
       
The last time it happened in India in 1999.