Joe Rao is Space.com's skywatching columnist, as well as a veteran meteorologist and eclipse chaser who also serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmers' Almanac and other publications.
The usual number of eclipses in a year is four; in a few years there can be 5, 6, and even 7. The year 2024 is the usual 4-eclipse kind. What underlies this is that there are two"eclipse seasons" each year.
A map of the United States showing the path of totality and degrees of partiality during the solar eclipse on April 8, 2024.A month before the eclipse when it came around between the sun and Earth, the moon was flying too far to the south to cast its shadow upon the Earth's surface, because it had yet to reach its ascending node which was still about 40 hours ahead.
Not quite an hour later, following the penumbra, the southern edge of a much darker shadow — the umbra, where the total eclipse is visible — arrives at 16:38:49.3 U.T., touching down on Earth farther to the west and much farther to the north over the open waters of the Pacific, at a point about 1,900 miles south-southwest of the big island of Hawaii.
In Texas, the umbra will visit four out of its top-five largest cities. At 1:34 p.m. C.D.T., San Antonio will be virtually cut in half by the southern limit of the totality path, with the Far West Side, Alamo Farmsteads and North Central sections of the city tucked just inside of the totality path, and the duration of totality ranging from roughly 1.7 to 2.2 minutes. At San Antonio International Airport, the total phase will last about 50 seconds.
According to the law of averages, a specific geographic location will experience a total solar eclipse on the order of once every 375 years. But here is a most unusual case of a city being treated to a view of two total solar eclipses within a timeframe of less than 7 years! On April 8, totality returns to Carbondale, at 1:59:14 p.m. C.D.T. and lasts 4 minutes 8 seconds. The third state capital to experience the total eclipse is Indianapolis, Indiana .
Syracuse is just inside the southern limit of totality, but will still see the total phase last for 1 minute 28 seconds starting at 3:22:59 p.m. E.D.T. As was the case with San Antonio, another major metropolitan area that will be sliced in two by the shadow, is Canada's second-most populous city, Montreal . The southern and eastern sections of the Island of Montreal will be darkened by the umbra at around 3:26:53 p.m. E.D.T. with LaSalle getting 1.9 minutes of totality, Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport, 1.3 minutes and Longue-Pointe a mere 18 seconds.
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