LONG ISLAND, NY – It's almost time on Long Island for the total solar eclipse on Monday, April 8. But when should you put on eclipse glasses and look up at the dark sky?
On Long Island, the moon will cover about 89.1 percent of the sun at the peak of the eclipse, according to a zip code-searchable NASA map.
Here are the details:
The partial eclipse begins at 2:11 p.m
Total Start: 2:54 p.m
The eclipse will last approximately 2 hours and 26 minutes from start to finish on Long Island.
Long Island will be mostly clear, except for a few clouds in the afternoon, according to the National Weather Service. The silver lining: you won't need a heavy coat to watch the eclipse, with daytime highs as high as 60 degrees.
“Although there may be some high clouds around, total cloud cover is not expected during the eclipse,” the National Weather Service station in New York said in a statement.
The total solar eclipse starts in Mexico, enters the United States in Texas, and travels through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, as well as small parts of Tennessee and Michigan, before entering Canada in southern Ontario via Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton before exiting mainland North America on the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
It will be March 30, 2033, before another total solar eclipse touches the United States, and this one is just off the edge of Alaska. It will be August 12, 2044, before the next eclipse sweeps across the lower 48 states, with parts of Montana and North Dakota experiencing totality.
Be sure to protect your eyes
Except for the brief total phase of a total solar eclipse, when the face of the sun is completely covered by the moon, it is not safe to look directly at the sun without eye protection, according to NASA.
The American Astronomical Society has a list of vendors whose eclipse glasses have been certified as safe. The organization specifically warns against bargain hunting for eclipse glasses from online marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay or Temu, because fake glasses have infiltrated retail chains. Wherever you buy safety glasses, they should meet or exceed the international safety standard ISO 12312-2:2015.
Also keep this in mind: Viewing any part of the bright sun through a camera lens, binoculars or telescope without a special purpose solar filter secured to the front of the optics will immediately cause serious eye injury. Another safe way to view the eclipse is with a DIY pinhole projector that points the sun at a nearby surface. The American Astronomical Society has instructions for DIY pinhole projectors.
A bigger deal than 2017
The total time in the United States will be up to 4 minutes and 24 seconds in Eagle Pass, Texas, starting at 1:27 p.m. CDT. By comparison, the eclipse reaches totality about an hour later, at 3:29 p.m. EDT in Jackman, Maine, and lasts approximately 3 minutes and 26 seconds.
Totality will last twice as long as 2017's coast-to-coast solar eclipse, and the number of people in the path of totality — about 32 million people — is far greater.
Eclipse opens the science window
Another thing that makes the 2024 solar eclipse significantly different from the 2017 event is that it occurs as the sun is at its peak activity cycle, called solar maximum. In 2017, the sun was approaching minimum. This year's eclipse opens a unique window for scientists to study the sun's corona.
“The eclipse coming in 2024 is going to be a very different eclipse than we saw in 2017 because that corona we're seeing is going to have a much larger structure,” Lisa Upton, a solar energy scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. in Boulder, Colorado, he told Scientific American.
The violent solar storms happening right now are responsible for the auroras dancing far beyond the Arctic and Antarctic regions, but they also have the potential to knock out Internet satellites for months, bring down power grids and jam satellites navigation. Right now, these events happen with little warning, but scientists are working on their ability to predict space weather.
