This is where you'll want to be on eclipse day! Where will you see the totality?
Early April 2024
People from all over the world begin to converge on North America. Except for people returning home, visiting family, or doing business at the exact moment in history, these will be people who will take a trip to go wherever the Moon's shadow touches the earth and will position themselves in a carefully chosen location, sometimes years in advance, to ensure they will see the eclipse.
These people will make contingency travel plans in case clouds arrive at the last minute. These people will fill hotel rooms, sometimes inadvertently displacing locals from their homes as space becomes harder to find. These people will travel through miles of desert or forest or a frozen desert, facing the most adverse conditions... to catch a glimpse of the eclipsed Sun.
These people come to North America to see one of nature's greatest spectacles: a total solar eclipse! For those of us who already live here, but have never seen the entirety, this is the opportunity of a lifetime: to see the most beautiful thing on the planet and maybe not even have to take a plane to get to it!
April 5, 2024
Almost everyone who plans to view the eclipse will be in position. Visitors from abroad will be finishing their sightseeing tours, and will be arriving at their pre-selected viewing areas to ensure that there are no technical problems in their trip that could deprive them of their true objective. Cities along the route that have decided to create official eclipse viewing areas will focus on logistics, to ensure the comfort, enjoyment and safety of their guests. People who have converged on those sites to view the eclipse will begin the countdown to eclipse day as final preparations are made to ensure photography equipment, filters, chairs, tables, telescopes, TV monitors, equipment of webcasting, hats, sunscreen and eclipse glasses Eclipse Glasses will be ready for the big day!
Breaking weather forecasts check out and anyone with the slightest fear of clouds on eclipse day will invoke their travel contingencies. Weather monitoring will take place throughout the day, with live updates broadcast every hour to better prepare eclipse seekers who will need to move at any moment. Nothing will get in your way of viewing the eclipse!
April 6-7, 2024
Last-minute arrivals will arrive, along with those who have had to battle their own travel problems, and made alternative arrangements to get here. Some will have missed their visits before the eclipse, but that's okay, as long as they are on the trail on Sunday night, everything will be fine. The focus can be the team, mental preparation and the weather.
The scientists and amateur photographers who will film the event review their preparations one last time. Sequences of events and actions that have been planned years in advance and practiced countless times to ensure mastery, will be practiced one last time. All batteries will be replaced with new ones. All film, equipment, lenses, filters and memory cards will be double and triple checked. Everything will be laid out, taped, sealed against dew, and packed up one last time. Tomorrow is the big day, and nothing can go wrong.
April 8, 2024
The day of the Eclipse!
No human action can interrupt the ceaseless dance of the cosmos, and the shadow of the Moon will not wait for you if you are not ready. Like a mindless giant, he makes his way through space toward a collision course with Earth. And, as astronomers predicted decades in advance, the shadow arrives with perfect precision and lands in the South Pacific Ocean at 16:38:44UT, at local sunrise. This point is located north of Penrhyn Atoll in the Cook Islands, where residents of the villages of Omoka and Te Tautua will witness a beautiful sunrise! The eclipse on the Atoll will have more than 98% coverage of the Sun's disk, but unfortunately, it will not be total!
One minute after it hits land, the entire shadow (the "threshold cone") will have reached land, for example by falling ocean, and will be racing over the water surface at supersonic speed. Except for people on boats at sea, and the occasional ocean-dwelling creature that dares to venture too close to the surface, nothing sentient will notice the passing of the umbra as it glides over the water. The total.
ity first touches the equator at 16:53:14UT, but the first landing is still almost an hour away.
And that first land is Socorro Island (which receives more than 3m of totality just after 17:51UT), almost 650 km off the coast of Mexico. However, if you want to try to see from there, you may have difficulty. There is no public airport, but you can get here by long-range dive boat!
While Socorro Island continues to enjoy totality, the shadow overtakes its sister island, San Benedicto Island. This island is much smaller, still covered in the remains of a large volcanic eruption in 1952, and is uninhabited. You can also take a dive boat there and share the entirety with the island's friendly manta rays! But here, you'll be closer to the edge of the path, so totality here only lasts about 2 minutes.
The last offshore islands that are on the route are San Juanito, María Madre and María Magdalena. The first two islands are entirely in the path, while only the western third of Mary Magdalene will experience totality. There is a fourth island in this small chain, called Maria Cleofas - but it is completely out of the way, and sees only 99.5% coverage. The largest island in this "Maria" chain is María Madre, and it is the only populated island of the four. Its largest settlement of Puerto Balleto will experience around 2m 45s of totality, a little before 18:05UT.
The National Park on Isabel Island is outside the route. Too bad seeing the entirety of this earthly paradise would have been an incredible sight! The continent is next!.
No comments:
Post a Comment