This Saturday, people all over the US will be able to see a crescent-shaped partial solar eclipse as the moon passes over the sun.
In the Bay Area and Santa Cruz, the moon will cover between 70% and 80% of the sun according to Paul Lynam, resident astronomer at U.C. Santa Cruz’s Lick Observatory. Because the eclipse will be happening on the morning of Oct. 14 around 8:05am, during bright morning daylight, the eclipse will be barely perceptible to the unbeknownst early riser.
Still, it’s worth taking the time to notice—even though solar eclipses happen twice a year around the world, it’s rarer that they happen somewhere as convenient as our city, Lynam says.
Lynam stresses the importance of safe viewing during eclipse: never look at the sun directly, always use an indirect method like a basic pinhole camera or use safe viewing sunglasses—like the ones the Santa Cruz Public Libraries are handing out.
He says his favorite way to witness partial eclipses like this one is simply by standing by a tree: the leaves on the tree create a pinhole effect and can project an image of the sun onto the ground, which will appear as crescent shapes scattered on pavements.
Historically, Lynam says astronomers would use partial eclipses like this one for timing purposes. The time of the eclipse would provide information about the orbital patterns of the moon and characteristics of the sun.
With modern technology, relying on eclipses for those purposes is not necessary anymore: but, astronomers still take advantage of total eclipses to learn about the characteristics of the sun’s outer atmosphere. Because solar light is obscured during total eclipses, astronomers can better observe the sun’s outermost atmosphere, a subject that has been a source of mystery for astronomers.
The next solar eclipse in the United States will be happening in April of 2024 and Lynam is planning on traveling to Texas where he can experience the eclipse in totality. He recalled the most recent total eclipse that he saw in 2017 in Tennessee.
“It was wonderful, but it probably wasn’t wonderful in the sense that you might expect,” Lynam says. “I quite enjoyed the peripheral things around it rather than the actual Eclipse itself. So I enjoyed seeing the streetlights come on in the daytime and the change in the insect and animal behavior.”
In the meantime, Lynam says there’s always something to be gained by going out to observe the nighttime skies, especially in winter, a time that displays constellations that people might be more familiar with.
“It’s always a nice activity over weeks or months to spend a few minutes if it’s a clear night and notice the patterns of the stars changing,” Lynam says. “It reflects the motion of the Earth progressing in its orbit and the individual movements of some of the planets because they rarely stay fixed in position over more than a week or two.”
And even though he works nights, Lynam says he plans on trying to see the partial eclipse this Saturday.
“It’s for me very early in the morning, because I’ll probably go to bed at five or six in the morning,” he says. “But I do plan to make the effort at least to look up a couple of times during that two hour period to see the progression of the moon shadow in front of us. It’s always worth the effort.”
Use NASA’s interactive eclipse map to check when the eclipse will pass over your area.
