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Unless you’ve been living under a moon-sized rock, you’ve probably heard that a total eclipse is happening on April 8. And if you live in Toronto, you may also have heard that the city will experience better than 99% coverage of the sun by the moon. Amazing, right?
Yes. But also no. The difference between 99 per cent and 100 per cent may seem like a minor one if you’re writing a test — it’s an A+ either way — but in the realm of eclipses, it’s literally the difference between night and day.
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“There’s no such thing as a 99% total eclipse,” said Dr. Rick Feinberg of the American Astronomical Society, during a recent press seminar on the upcoming eclipse, which will be visible in parts of Mexico, the United States and Canada. “There is such thing as a 99% partial eclipse. There’s no such thing as being 99% pregnant. It’s all or nothing, so that’s why you should get into the path.”
The reason has to do with how bright the sun is. It’s roughly 400,000 times brighter than the moon, which means even a one per cent sliver will give off as much light as 400 full moons. It will be noticeable if you’re outside, as a kind of dusky twilight that lasts a few seconds before full daylight returns again.
And it will be visible to the naked eye, although the naked eye is not the way to look at it — even mostly covered, the sun can damage the retina, so eclipse glasses are necessary to avoid injuring your eyes.
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Within the path of totality, it’s a very different experience. It will get very dark — like, night-time dark — as the entire sun is covered by the moon. The air temperature will drop. Birds may fall silent. The sun’s corona — the outermost part of its atmosphere, usually lost in the glare of the sun itself — will show as a ghostly ring around the moon.
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You can take off your eclipse glasses at this point, as long as you look away or put them back on as soon as the sun reappears. And the whole thing will last up to several minutes, depending how close you are to the centre of the path of totality.
If you stay in Toronto, you’re out of that path completely, and out of luck. The very edge of totality, where the moon covers 100 per cent of the sun, will sweep across the Earth in a southwest-to-northeast direction, covering Burlington and Oakville in the west before moving out over Lake Ontario, and then touching land again just east of Newcastle.
From there, it will roughly straddle the 401 — Kingston, Brockville, Cornwall, you’re in for a show — before slicing through Montreal. Most of the city lies inside the path of totality, but northern neighbourhoods like Laval are just outside and will see only 99 per cent.
Further east, Sherbrooke, Que., gets the total eclipse, as does Fredericton and Miramichi, N.B., as well as Summerside, P.E.I. However, Moncton and Charlottetown lie just outside the path.
In Newfoundland, St. John’s will narrowly miss the show, but Eclipse Island near Burgeo, NL, will fall in the path of totality. The island got its name because it’s where Captain James Cook observed the eclipse of Aug. 5, 1766, using the event to calculate his exact position on the Earth.
That 258-year gap illustrates just how rare an eclipse is, at least if you don’t travel to see it. In Toronto, the last time the city saw totality was almost a century ago, on Jan. 24, 1925. And the next time will be more than a century hence, on Oct. 26, 2144.
You may have heard of Sept. 14, 2099, as the date of Toronto’s next solar eclipse. That one will cover parts of Mississauga and points west, but Toronto proper will once again get 99 per cent coverage. And that’s nothing. Leave a note for your great-grandkids to head west.
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