Can we see the total solar eclipse?
How to get the best view on Aug. 21
“Seeing a partial eclipse,” Annie Dillard once wrote, “bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.”
Canadians looking up next Monday then — like a nation of frustrated online daters — are in for a whole bunch of kissing, but unless they travel south, no marriage at all.
When is it happening?
North America’s first full solar eclipse in decades will sweep across the continental U.S. beginning at 9:05 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Aug. 21. It will bring with it a wave of dark shadow that travels more than 3,000 km/h, blacking out the sky for minutes at a time in a narrow band from Oregon to South Carolina.
But in Canada, only a distant, pale cousin of the American totality will be visible, and only then in certain spots. The best Canadian eclipse views will happen in and around Victoria, where as much as 90 per cent of the sun will be blacked out. Vancouver and Calgary will both enjoy over 80 per cent coverage, while a host of other cities, including Toronto, Regina, London, Edmonton and Thunder Bay will see the moon occlude more than 70 per cent of the sun.
What can we expect to see in Canada?
There are eclipse-watching events scheduled across Canada on Monday. The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada has a list of them online. In Victoria, society members will be atop Mount Tolmie, while the University of Victoria observatory will be open to the public. In Toronto, the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics is hosting a watching party at the CNE. The Canadian Aviation and Space Museum has an event planned in Ottawa.
What can you expect? That depends where you’re watching from. According to the Astronomical Society, the sky will look noticeably dimmed only after about 80 per cent of the sun is obscured. “At 90 per cent, just a thin slit of sunlight remains visible and the lighting not only is greatly diminished but also begins to take on a silvery or steely appearance and shadows appear unnaturally sharp,” Alan Dyer wrote in an eclipse guide prepared by the society. “These effects are visible to some extent from locations farther north, but in areas where only 50 to 75 per cent of the Sun is covered, you might not notice much going on.”
If it’s cloudy (I’m looking at you, Vancouver), you probably won’t see anything at all.
Protect your eyes
Of course, if you do want to watch, you’ll need protection. In Toronto, the Dunlap Institute will be handing out eclipse glasses at the CNE. You can also buy them online, but be careful. Eclipse hoaxers looking to cash in on this once-in-a-generation event are already hawking fakes. Amazon announced on Sunday that it was refunding some buyers who bought subpar glasses through its site.
The partial eclipse
The partial eclipse will last about three hours in Canada. That’s measured from the time the moon first begins to intersect the Sun until it has fought its way completely clear. It begins in Victoria at 9:09 a.m. PDT and ends in St. John’s at 5:24 NDT.
As Dillard wrote, however, a partial eclipse is fine. It’s “very interesting.” But it bears almost no relation to the real thing. In her classic 1982 essay, Dillard described the experience she had watching the last total solar eclipse to land in North America, in 1979. It reads today like the lived description of a two-minute apocalypse:
“From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the Earth rolled down.”
In other words, Canada’s partial eclipse will be neat enough. If you’re really lucky, it might be kind of cool. But the total solar eclipse will be an experience on a completely different scale.
What is a total solar eclipse?
A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes in front of the sun at exactly the right distance to appear, on earth, as if it were exactly the same size, in exactly the same place as the sun. As a result, it creates a dark shadow, or umbra, that blots out light across the band of totality. The shadow will travel with remarkable speed, crossing through the entire continent in about 90 minutes. For several minutes at a time, locations along the path will see a sun blacked out from the sky, with only the corona, an ethereal crown of surrounding light, still visible from the ground.
It is, from many accounts throughout history, a profound and almost indescribable experience, one that puts into stark relief the reality of our existence on this tiny orb.
“This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt,” Dillard wrote about the oncoming shadow, “the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds.”
It’s not too late to plan a trip south, to see this all for yourself, though getting a hotel at this point anywhere close to the path of totality may be a challenge.
Some people plan eclipse trips years in advance and the actual band of land where the entire sun will disappear is only about 110 kilometres wide.
The total eclipse will last the longest, about two minutes and 38 seconds, just outside Carbondale, Ill. It will pass through or near major centres including Nashville, Portland, Cincinnati and Charlotte.