Monday eclipse best viewed in Eastern Canada, but local observatory still planning a party

“Eclipse cookies” will be on the menu when Randy Enkin and his family and friends look skyward on Monday after travelling to Eastern Canada for a better view of a total solar eclipse. It will just be a 28 per cent eclipse on southern Vancouver Island.

Those cookies are vanilla with a bite-sized piece removed and replaced with chocolate — mimicking how the sun will look at one stage of the eclipse.

Enkin, a dedicated amateur astronomer from Victoria, is combining a visit with relatives in Eastern Canada with a chance for a full-on look at the eclipse, since it will be only partially visible on Canada’s West Coast.

He said he’ll see the event unfold with about 20 others during an eclipse party at his in-laws’ house in Montreal, indulging a passion that began when he watched the 1969 moon landing on television as an eight-year-old.

Eclipse viewing is always better in certain parts of the world than others, and according to the Canadian Space Agency, a total solar eclipse hasn’t been at its peak over Quebec since 1972.

Views of Monday’s eclipse and its “path of totality” will be outstanding not only in Montreal, but also in Ontario cities such as Niagara Falls and Kingston and parts of New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, as it cuts a swath eastward from Mazatlan in Mexico, Enkin said.

That will be it for a while in Canada, as far as prime eclipsewatching goes. “We don’t get another good one until 2044.”

In Victoria, 28 per cent of the sun will be covered by the moon during the Monday eclipse.

“It will be definitely observable, but a bit underwhelming,” Enkin said.

A total solar eclipse — where the moon passes between the Earth and the sun and blocks the sun’s face — comes along about every 18 months, while other forms of eclipses happen a few times a year.

Most recently, a rare annular eclipse, in which a bright “ring of fire” from the sun borders the moon, captured attention in October in Victoria, where people saw about 90 per cent of the effect.

That spectacle was referred to as a “celestial warm-up act” for Monday’s event by the website Greatamericaneclipse.com.

Enkin said a total solar eclipse represents an “incredible” coming together of factors, in which the moon — which is 1/400th the size of the sun — can virtually block it out because the sun is almost 400 times as far away from Earth.

It produces a display of the sun’s atmosphere as a fringe of light, or corona, around the moon.

“It’s absolutely remarkable,” said Enkin, a geologist by trade as well as past-president of the Victoria Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

He said he has spoken at schools during his trip about avoiding eye damage from the eclipse, stressing the use of safety glasses and the technique of viewing the spectacle using a colander, for example, while facing away from the sun.

Hold the colander or a piece of paper with holes in it over your shoulder and look at the ground as the sun shines through, Enkin said.

“Then you get to see the projection of the eclipse and it is so cool.”

Certified safety glasses with cardboard frames and a special Mylar lens can cost as little as $10, said Enkin, who stresses that it’s always dangerous to look at the sun, whether an eclipse is happening or not.

“The problem is that during an eclipse, it’s so interesting that people will often look too much,” he said. “We don’t want people hurting their eyes.”

He said the eclipse can put our place in the universe in perspective.

“It’s one of those times when you can actually see how fast the moon and sun move,” Enkin said. “People have been interested in this for thousands of years and here we get this really, really concrete example of where we are in space.”

A Total Solar Eclipse Party is being held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Monday at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory at 5071 West Saanich Rd., atop Little Saanich Mountain.

No tickets are needed and eclipse glasses will be available. There will be livestreaming of the full eclipse in the site’s Black Hole Auditorium.

Former observatory director Dennis Crabtree will give a brief presentation.

The best viewing will start at 10:41 a.m., peak at 11:29 a.m. and end at 12:19 p.m., for a total of one hour and 38 minutes.

The forecast for Monday is cloudy with periods of rain.

For more information, email info@centreoftheuniverse.org.