Many eyes will turn to the sky on Saturday to catch a glimpse of a particularly rare “ring of fireside” solar eclipse. But experts are cautioning against looking directly on the eclipse to avoid serious eye damage.
An annular eclipse occurs while the Moon is near or on the farthest point in its orbit across the Earth. The Moon, which appears smaller within the sky for this reason distance, passes directly in front of the Sun, creating this “ring of fireside” effect.
People across the contiguous United States and a part of Alaska should have the ability to see the eclipse. Most regions will only see a partial eclipse, through which only an element of the Sun is roofed up by the Moon.
A fuller eclipse shall be viewable in parts of Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Latest Mexico, and Texas. Several cities may have the perfect view, including Eugene, Oregon; Albuquerque, Latest Mexico; and San Antonio, Texas. Within the US, it’s going to begin in Oregon at 9:13AM PT and end in Texas at 12:03PM CT. The eclipse can even be visible in parts of Central and South America.
But please, for the love of God, don’t look right at it. It could burn your retina “pretty badly and almost instantaneously,” NASA heliophysics research and evaluation lead Patrick Koehn tells . And this goes double for taking a look at the eclipse with sunglasses.
“With sunglasses, it’s type of a double whammy since you’re still taking a look at the sun and these glasses aren’t designed to filter out that much light,” Koehn said. “But now your pupils have gotten greater, so that you’re letting in much more solar radiation.”
The popular method to view the eclipse is to make use of solar glasses that block out much of the sunshine but still will let you view the disc of the Sun. One other method is to poke a hole in a sheet of paper, stand along with your back to the Sun, and think about the eclipse as a shadow through the pinhole on the bottom.
Tomorrow’s eclipse actually kicks off an enormous 12 months of heliophysics, which is the study of the Sun and its surrounding environment. Along with the annular eclipse, there shall be a second eclipse in April 2024 — a complete eclipse this time — followed by the Parker Solar Probe, which is the fastest spacecraft ever built by humans.
But tomorrow’s annular eclipse is admittedly the premier event, Koehn explained, due to its rarity. “For an annular eclipse, the Moon must be near apogee,” he said. “It’s [the Moon’s] farthest distance from the Earth during its orbit. So it’s a special little bit of alignment that has to occur for an annular eclipse.”