Europe was yesterday given a front-row seat on the first solar eclipse of 2011 only to find that in many places a thick curtain of cloud marred the spectacle.

In London, Paris and Rome, hopes for a spooky darkening of the winter skies at sunrise were dashed by dense cloud which turned the event into a grey mush.

“Aaah so much hype of an eclipse... all I saw was the usual British cloud!!!” said Twitter contributor Romana Alli in Britain. Sweden, especially the north of the country, had been predicted to be one of the best places to see the natural phenomenon, with the sun being eclipsed by more than 80 per cent in some areas, according to Goeran Olofsson, a professor of astronomy at Stockholm observatory.

But astronomy blogs reported that northern areas were also hit by cloud.

In the Swedish capital, however, there was a better view.

Rising over Stockholm’s snow-covered roofs, the crescent sun emerged from the haze, before gradually shaking off the moon’s shadow, an AFP reporter saw. The show turned the sun into a crescent from about 0712 to 0956 GMT, with the clearest view emerging at around 0830 GMT.

Yesterday’s partial eclipse occurred when a fraction of the moon obscured the sun, making it seem – in clear skies – as if a bite had been taken out of the solar face.

Star-gazers enjoyed the spectacle in southern Spain and Israel, where several observatories ran live webcasts using telescopes fitted with special filters.

Eclipse-watchers have had an unusually bumper year, according to Nasa, which counts two partial solar and two total eclipses in 2011.

The next partial solar eclipse will be on June 1, visible in eastern Siberia, northern China, Alaska and northern Canada.

Total solar eclipses occur when the sun, moon and earth are all perfectly in line.

The sun is 400 times wider than the moon, but it is also 400 times farther away, which means the lunar shadow, or umbra, is just wide enough to cover the face of the sun.