Solar Eclipse 2024: A Celestial Spectacle in North America – Your Essential Guide
If you haven’t experienced a total solar eclipse, you haven’t lived.
On Monday, April 8, an incredibly rare and spectacular experience will be on offer to hundreds of millions of people in North America. Most will miss it, instead having a peek at a partial solar eclipse many hundreds of miles from where the action really takes place—the path of totality.
While everyone is talking about the solar eclipse, you might be wondering, what is an eclipse? Or, what does this mean astrologically? Don’t worry, we’ve got you.
Here’s your complete guide the solar eclipse 2024, including the facts to help you survive and thrive.
What Is a solar Eclipse?
A solar eclipse happens during the new moon when the moon passes between the earth and the sun, blocking our view of at least part of the sun; a total solar eclipse (like the one happening on April 8) is when the moon completely blocks the sun.
Eye Safety During a Total Solar Eclipse
Except during the brief total phase of a total solar eclipse, when the Moon completely blocks the Sun’s bright face, it is not safe to look directly at the Sun without specialized eye protection for solar viewing.
Viewing any part of the bright Sun through a camera lens, binoculars, or a telescope without a special-purpose solar filter secured over the front of the optics will instantly cause severe eye injury.
When watching the partial phases of the solar eclipse directly with your eyes, which happens before and after totality, you must look through safe solar viewing glasses (“eclipse glasses”) or a safe handheld solar viewer at all times. Eclipse glasses are NOT regular sunglasses; regular sunglasses, no matter how dark, are not safe for viewing the Sun. Safe solar viewers are thousands of times darker and ought to comply with the ISO 12312-2 international standard. NASA does not approve any particular brand of solar viewers.
Always inspect your eclipse glasses or handheld viewer before use; if torn, scratched, or otherwise damaged, discard the device. Always supervise children using solar viewers.
Do NOT look at the Sun through a camera lens, telescope, binoculars, or any other optical device while wearing eclipse glasses or using a handheld solar viewer — the concentrated solar rays will burn through the filter and cause serious eye injury.
If you don’t have eclipse glasses or a handheld solar viewer, you can use an indirect viewing method, which does not involve looking directly at the Sun. One way is to use a pinhole projector, which has a small opening (for example, a hole punched in an index card) and projects an image of the Sun onto a nearby surface. With the Sun at your back, you can then safely view the projected image. Do NOT look at the Sun through the pinhole!
Darkness. Oh, the sun is going to be eclipsed. That alone is a monumental event. And you know, it happens every year. The [moon] gets in the way the sun every year, but effects some narrow part of the Earth. So, the next one over Indiana will be like 100 years from now. We’ll all be dead. I might not be, but you guys are going to be dead the next time. So it’s an event. But when you ponder the mystery of you pondered what’s taking place in the heavens, it’s gargantuan.
William Shatner
