Here ’ s What Determines How Long the Total Eclipse Will Last in Your Location

If you’re like all but 74 Americans, you do not live in Radar Base, Texas. Seventy-four is the population of the town, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Such a tiny place may not be much to your liking, but on April 8, you’ll have cause to envy the people who do live there. That’s because Radar Base will experience four minutes and 27 seconds of totality during the eclipse that will cross the mainland U.S. that day. The celestial spectacle will track from southwestern Texas up through New England in a 185 km (115 mi.) band of totality passing over more than 31 million people. But no other U.S. city will get as much time in the darkness. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Total eclipses are dazzling things, but also exceedingly fleeting things, and just how long they’ll last is very much a function of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, the moon’s orbit around the Earth and where exactly you’re standing on the sphere of our world when the phenomenon is playing out. Broadly speaking, a total solar eclipse is a function of a bit of cosmic serendipity: the sun is roughly 400 times bigger than the moon, but also 400 times further away, which means that the two disks appear to be about the same size in the sky. When the moon passes in front of the sun, it may thus perfectly and completely block its light, creating a deep black circle, with the fires of the sun—the corona—flaring out in all directions. But no...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Eclipse healthscienceclimate Source Type: news