If you wake up early enough on Thursday, and take some precautions, you will be able to see a partial eclipse of the sun in progress. It’s not exactly a rare event, but an impressive one, says Mount Allison astronomer Catherine Lovekin.
Hear Catherine Lovekin in conversation on Tantramar Report:
Barring cloudy skies, Thursday’s annular solar eclipse, “will be visible as a partial eclipse from Sackville,” says Lovekin. “So we’re not in the path of totality—as total as it gets for an annular eclipse—but it is going to be visible as a partial eclipse. The caveat there is that it starts very, very early. And so the eclipse is over by about 7:30, 7:45 in the morning. So you’re going to have to get up super early.”
Lovekin says if it’s not in progress when the sun rises it will start soon after. “If you’re out there about 6 o’clock in the morning you will get a good view,” says Lovekin.
But that view should come with serious precautions. “It’s really, really important not to look at the sun,” says Lovekin.
Because so much of the sun is blocked out during an eclipse, it seems less bright, which means your instinct to avert your eyes will not kick in. “It doesn’t hurt your eyes immediately like it normally does if you look at the sun,” says Lovekin, “but it’s still so bright, it can cause serious eye damage if you look at it for more than a second or two.”
Picture what sunlight through a magnifying glass can do to an innocent ant on a sidewalk, and you get an idea of what the sun through your eye’s lens is capable of doing to your retina. It’s just not worth the risk, especially when there are other options rather than staring at the sun.
Lovekin says there’s a number of ways to view an eclipse safely. “If you have a telescope, you can get a solar filter. It needs to be a proper solar filter. They block out a lot of light to make it safe to look at the sun,” she says.
You can also get yourself a pair of eclipse glasses (regular sunglasses will not provide adequate protection.) There may even be a supply of eclipse glasses floating around Sackville. “There was a solar eclipse here a few years ago,” says Lovekin, “and we had a big event at the observatory. We gave out a bunch of eclipse glasses, so if you’ve still got a pair of them that they should be still safe to use.”
The easiest thing to do, with no special equipment required, is to project the eclipse yourself, through a tiny hole.
“You can use almost anything that has small holes in it. You can get pretty good views of the eclipse using like a spaghetti strainer or a ladle that’s got circular holes in it,” says Lovekin. “Even just an index card with a pinhole punched in it to basically make a pinhole camera.”
Using this method, you would stand with your back to the sun, holding out the pinhole device, and pointing the image it creates at a surface you can view.
“You just have to get the angle right and the distance from whatever surface you’re trying to project the sun on,” says Lovekin, “and you can watch the image of the sun and see the eclipse that way.”
There are various instructional videos online, like this one from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center:
WHAT EXACTLY IS AN ANNULAR ECLIPSE?
This Thursday’s eclipse will be an annular solar eclipse, as opposed to a total solar eclipse. In an annular solar eclipse, the moon will not completely block out the sun, leaving a fiery ring in the sky.
The different types of eclipses happens “because the orbit of the moon is not quite a circle, it’s elliptical,” says Lovekin. “And so sometimes the moon is a little bit closer to us. And sometimes the moon is a little bit further away. When it’s furthest away from us, it’s actually a little bit smaller than the sun in the sky. And so if you take the two circles, the two disks of the sun and the moon and overlap them, the moon doesn’t quite block out the complete sun… And so you’re left with a ring of sun that isn’t eclipsed by the moon.”
WHY DO WE LOVE ECLIPSES?
Solar eclipses are not rare events, but each one has a relatively narrow geographic area where they are visible, either partially or in totality.
“This is the first solar eclipse of this year,” says Lovekin, “but there’s another one later in the summer. Somewhere on Earth, there is a solar eclipse at least once a year, usually more often.”
But that doesn’t take away from the wow factor. Lovekin says people are fascinated by eclipses partly because they are an astronomical event that you can witness in your backyard.
“A lot of astronomy is very abstract and out of reach,” says Lovekin. “We’ve all seen the images that come back through the Hubble Space Telescope, and those are great images to look at, but they’re not something that the average person is able to go and reproduce in their backyard. Whereas something like a solar eclipse or a lunar eclipse is very easy to observe.”
Lovekin says during the last solar eclipse, sunlight filtered through leafy trees even served as a viewing platform. “When the sun was shining through leaves on the trees, you could see little images of the eclipse,” says Lovekin. “So it’s very easy to observe. It’s very easy to get excited about it. And it’s a pretty spectacular event.”