Don’t get burned, burned, burned by the ring of fire that will slice across North American skies on Oct. 14. With the right protective eyewear, viewing this unusual space spectacle should be fine, fine, fine.
When the moon passes in front of the sun, casting a shadow upon the land (and our earthbound eyes), that’s called an eclipse. Much of North America was treated to a doozy of an eclipse of a different sort in August 2017. The moon blocked the disc of the sun so completely, it provided some viewers a rare glimpse of the wildly waving solar corona reaching millions of miles into space.
That was a total solar eclipse — if you were lucky enough to view it from within the zone of totality, which was about 70 miles wide and began south of Portland. If you were watching from Vancouver, you saw only a partial eclipse, with the sun peeking around the moon’s edge throughout the event.
This year’s solar eclipse won’t be total, no matter where you are, because the moon happens to be a smidgen (astronomically speaking) farther away from us than it was in August 2017. It will appear a bit smaller in the sky, darkening only 91 percent of the sun’s bright disc.
If you go
What: Stan Seeberg, longtime organizer of the now-defunct Vancouver Sidewalk Astronomers, will set up his telescope with a solar filter for an eclipse-viewing session.
When: 8 a.m. Oct. 14
Where: Parking lot of Jack in the Box, 221 N.E. 104th Ave., Vancouver
But that’s no cosmic anticlimax, because it leaves the sun’s outermost circumference, the annulus, beautifully visible in a glowing ring of fire that gives the annular eclipse its nickname. Local skywatchers determined to catch the full ring effect must once again venture into Oregon, at least about 100 miles south of here, to reach the so-called annularity zone where the whole ring is visible.
At its maximum, that zone will be about 120 miles wide. For example, it will extend from just north of Newport to just south of Bandon as the moon’s shadow moves east from the Pacific Ocean into central Oregon. (Check out a nifty, animated moon’s-eye-view of the annularity zone at GreatAmericanEclipse.com.) The moon’s shadow will slide diagonally down across the continent, from northwest to southeast, at 7,534 miles per hour, according to Jim Todd, space science educator at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.
Viewers within that zone will be able to see the entire ring of fire, with the dark circle of moon more or less centered inside it, for a few minutes. People at the edges of the annularity zone may glimpse the ring of fire broken into Baily’s Beads, which occur as shafts of sunlight slip past irregular features on the moon’s surface (mountains, canyons and crevices) and appear to us as individual points or smudges of light.
If you’re watching from Vancouver, you won’t see a whole ring. From here, 86 percent of the sun will be covered up. (Were you to travel far north or south — to the Arctic Circle or South Pacific — you’d see a small sliver of the moon and lots more unobstructed sun.)
“Although the 2023 eclipse won’t be as dark as the eclipse of 2017, it will still be pretty impressive,” Todd said. The last annular eclipse visible from these parts was in 2012, he said, and the next won’t be until 2077.
Viewed from Vancouver, the moon will begin its encroachment upon the sun at 8:06 a.m. Oct. 14. Maximum coverage will be at 9:19 a.m. The show’s over at 10:39 a.m.
Unfortunately, stargazers in the Pacific Northwest must always stay mindful of weather, Todd warned.
“Unlike in August 2017, when Oregon had the best climate in the nation for eclipse viewing, (typical fall weather) might mean we could have the worst climate in October 2023 for seeing the eclipse,” he said.
Even if you’ve traveled south, you can’t be sure that morning fog in the Willamette Valley and on the Oregon Coast won’t cause that cosmic anticlimax after all.
DID YOU KNOW?
An eclipse once provided the right experimental conditions to update the laws of physics.
In 1915, Albert Einstein’s new general theory of relativity proposed that the force of gravity is actually a curvature in the fabric of “spacetime.” An eclipse would be one way to prove it, Einstein suggested.
In 1919, during a total solar eclipse, scientists tracked how stars visible in the sun’s immediate background appeared slightly off-position, proving that their starlight was bent by the sun’s gravity. Without a convenient eclipse exposing those background stars, this couldn’t have been determined.
Another, truly total, solar eclipse will take place on April 8, 2024, but it’ll cross the continent from Texas to Maine, never visiting the Pacific Northwest.
Safe viewing
Because it burns, burns, burns the eyes, you should never, never, never look directly at the sun. We’ve been learning that since earliest childhood.
How, then, can you view an eclipse? With special solar-filter glasses, that’s how. These sold like hotcakes before the 2017 total solar eclipse, and you might just have a pair or two still lying around.
If not, shop for eclipse glasses that are approved by the American Astronomical Association, which cautions against online marketplaces that ship unapproved glasses. Don’t trust makers that claim endorsement by NASA or ISO (International Organization for Standardization), neither of which endorses or certifies commercial products.
In 2017, eclipse viewers learned to keep those glasses firmly in front of their eyes during the moon’s slow approach and departure, while the sun was still partially exposed. They slipped them off for a naked glimpse of the solar corona only during the two-minute totality itself, and then slipped them back on before the totality was over, preserving their eyesight.
If you can’t get a hold of solar-filter glasses in time, try this simplest-of-all methods for eclipse viewing: Poke a pinhole in a piece of paper. Hold that paper up to the sun during the eclipse so it casts a shadow plus one tiny shaft of light onto the ground.
Examine the dot of light on the ground, and you’ll discover it’s actually an image of the sun, complete with the moon eclipsing before it. What you’ve created is known as a pinhole camera. People have been using this simple technique to observe the sun in safety since ancient times.
