A total solar eclipse will cross North America next month, passing over Mexico, the United States, and Canada.
Dr. Patrick Treuthardt is the Assistant Head of the Astronomy & Astrophysics Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and he’s pretty excited for the April eclipse.
"Everybody in the contiguous United States is going to be able to see at least some of it,” he said, “It will be a partial eclipse for most people in the United States and for the select few in the path of totality, they're going to they're going to get to be able to see the sun being completely blocked out by the moon.”
On April 8, it will cross North America from Mexico, across the U.S. and into Canada, Treuthardt said, "Kind of a curved path from essentially San Antonio through Arkansas, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, New York, all the way up to Maine.”
In central Texas, where the eclipse will be total, Bell County has declared a state of emergency to prepare, saying the tiny county's population of 400,000 could double or even triple because of visitors coming to watch the skies.
Treuthardt isn’t surprised.
"The last eclipse in 2017 there were issues with traffic, different areas of the country as well,” he said, “So, I think people are preparing for it for sure.”
North Carolina will see the partial eclipse begin at around 2:00 that afternoon and Treuthardt said, “The moon is going to obscure about 75% of the disk of the sun, so it's going to look like a large bite has been taken out of the sun by the moon.”
You can’t stare directly at the sun to watch the eclipse, but Treuthardt said there’s still time to buy eclipse glasses online; you’ll want to make sure you’re purchasing them from a site you trust, though.
"It's very dangerous to look at the sun for an extended period of time because it can burn your retina. The sunlight has, I mean, there's so much energy from the sun that it focuses on to the back of your eye that it can burn your retina,” he explained, “So, you do want to be careful and you do want to make sure that these eclipse glasses that you get are good.”
But you don’t have to get that fancy. You can watch a reflection of the eclipse with inexpensive things you probably have laying around the house or the office.
"One of the easiest ways to do it is just take a piece of paper or a piece of cardboard, just punch a hole in it and then the sunlight will cast through that hole onto a surface. You know, maybe a white sheet of paper or something that you can actually view the image of the sun on that piece of paper,” the astrophysicist said.
Or, Treuthardt said, if you have a pair of binoculars you can also use them to see the eclipse – not by looking at it through them, that’s not safe, but by pointing them at the Sun and projecting the image onto a piece of white cardboard placed a foot or two behind them.
He said they shouldn’t be a pair you’re too attached to, though, "Because the sunlight that's passing through the lenses, there's a lot of energy in that sunlight, and it's actually going to heat up the lenses. And if the lenses aren't that well-made, they could potentially crack.”
Treuthardt and other scientists from the museum will travel to Texas to see the total eclipse. It’s not the first trip like this for him, but the last time he tried to catch a similar celestial event, in 2020, was a little disappointing.
"I managed to get onto an Antarctic voyage to try to see the eclipse a couple of years ago, but, unfortunately, it is Antarctica and the weather did not cooperate,” he said, “So, all we saw were clouds. It got dark and then the sunlight came back and that that was basically all we saw.”
Still, he recommends people try to get to an area to see the eclipse at full effect.
"It's only in the path of totality that you really get a spectacular view of the celestial mechanics that we live in,” Treuthardt said. “It's quite amazing.”
How long will the eclipse last as it passes overhead? The length of totality is almost exactly the length of the radio edit of Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 top-ten hit Total Eclipse of the Heart, around 4 1/2 minutes.
