"This is a once-in-a lifetime experience," said Amanda, who was with her sister Ashley, also 9, and their parents, Ken and Wendy Kimi of Honolulu, on the lawn at the Bishop Museum today, right at the peak of the partial solar eclipse over the islands.

The girls watched as Cliff Jenkins, who works on astronomy projects for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at the museum, adjusted a Sunspotter telescope as an image of the partially blocked sun moved slowly across the viewing surface.

The Kimi family joined several dozen people at the museum to view the phenomenon through a variety of filtered telescopes and other devices.

Amanda and Ashley said they learned in school that the next total eclipse over Hawaii would be in 2106.

At the peak of the eclipse at 2:42 p.m. local time, the moon covered about half the sun from view. There was no noticeable darkening of the partially cloudy skies over Honolulu.

People all over Hawai'i could view the partial solar eclipse for around four hours.

Today's eclipse was not total anywhere in the world, but it reached the annular stage on a patch across the northern Pacific to the west coast of Mexico. That is when the moon appears at the center of the sun, leaving a ring of sunlight. The moon, however, was too far away from the earth to cover the entire sun during this eclipse.

The annular eclipse, which lasts less than a minute, was best viewed in the Pacific from Saipan and Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands. The rest of the path was over water, passing about 1,800 miles north of the Hawaiian Islands.

The eclipse actually began in Asia on Tuesday local time, then the International Date Line to Monday. The best U.S. view was from Southern California, where about 70 percent of the sun was covered in partial eclipse.

In Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, tourists and residents watched as the moon covered 94 percent of the sun late in the day, leaving just a sliver of light.