Eclipses from Southern Alberta
A solar eclipse can damage your eyes in seconds if you watch it the wrong way. A lunar eclipse is safe for everyone to stare at all night. Here’s how to watch both safely, how to make a pinhole projector, and the next eclipses we can see from Lethbridge, including a total solar eclipse that crosses southern Alberta on the evening of August 22, 2044.
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Solar and lunar eclipses in a nutshell
Solar eclipse
The moon passes between the sun and Earth, and its shadow falls on part of Earth. It can only happen at new moon, in the daytime. Only people inside the moon’s shadow path see it, so any one place sees few of them.
Lunar eclipse
Earth passes between the sun and the moon, and Earth’s shadow falls on the moon. It can only happen at full moon, at night. Everyone on the night side of Earth can see it at once, so they’re much more common from any one spot.
Kinds of solar eclipse
- Partial: the moon covers part of the sun, taking a “bite” out of it. The sky doesn’t get dark, and you need eye protection the whole time.
- Annular: the moon is a bit too far from Earth to cover the sun completely, so a bright ring of sun is left around it. Eye protection is needed the whole time.
- Total: the moon covers the sun completely for up to a few minutes (less than two minutes from Lethbridge in 2044). The sky goes dark, stars and planets come out, and the sun’s pearly outer atmosphere, the corona, appears. This is the only time it’s safe to look without protection, and only during totality itself.
Kinds of lunar eclipse
- Penumbral: the moon passes through the faint outer part of Earth’s shadow. The change is so slight that most people don’t notice it.
- Partial: part of the moon passes through Earth’s dark inner shadow, and a dark bite appears on one side.
- Total: the whole moon passes into the inner shadow and usually turns a deep orange, copper or red.
Solar eclipse eye safety
Looking at the sun without proper protection can permanently damage your eyes, and it doesn’t hurt while it happens. NASA puts it simply: safety is the number one priority when viewing a solar eclipse.
Ordinary sunglasses are never safe for looking at the sun, not even very dark ones, not several pairs stacked together, and not polarized ones. The American Astronomical Society notes that ordinary sunglasses let through hundreds to thousands of times more light than is safe. Never look at the sun through a camera, binoculars, a telescope or a phone screen held up to your eye, and never look through any of them while wearing eclipse glasses. The focused sunlight can burn through the filter and injure your eye.
Safe ways to look directly
- Eclipse glasses or hand-held solar viewers that meet the international standard ISO 12312-2. This standard sets what a solar viewer must block to protect your eyes.
- A proper solar filter fitted securely over the front of binoculars, a telescope or a camera lens. This is equipment for experienced users. A filter over the eyepiece end is not safe.
Checking your eclipse glasses
The American Astronomical Society warns that anyone can print “ISO 12312-2” on a package, so the label alone doesn’t prove anything. Its advice:
- Buy from a trusted source. The American Astronomical Society keeps a list called Suppliers of Safe Solar Viewers & Filters. Buy directly from a manufacturer on that list, or from a dealer that the manufacturer itself names as authorized. The AAS no longer checks every seller.
- Inspect them. Throw away any viewer that’s torn, scratched, punctured or coming loose from its frame. Keep them flat and dry between eclipses.
- Do the indoor test. Put them on inside. You should see nothing at all except very bright lights, and those should look faint. If you can see furniture or pictures on the wall, they’re not dark enough.
- Do the sun test. Outside, a quick look should show a crisp, round, comfortably bright sun on a dark background.
- Put them on before you look up, and look away before you take them off. Teach kids this order and practise it.
What it means for you: an adult should watch children the whole time they’re using eclipse glasses, to make sure they keep them on and don’t peek around the edges. For very young children, a pinhole projector is easier and safer, because they never look at the sun at all.
Safe ways to watch indirectly
If you don’t have proper eclipse glasses, you can still enjoy a partial eclipse by projecting an image of the sun onto the ground or a sheet of paper, with your back to the sun. NASA lists pinhole projection as a safe indirect method. A few ways to do it:
- A home-made pinhole projector (see below)
- A kitchen colander or a cracker with holes in it: every hole projects its own little crescent sun
- Your own fingers, crossed into a waffle pattern
- The shade of a leafy tree, where the gaps between leaves throw dozens of crescent suns on the ground
Make a pinhole projector
This takes ten minutes and works for any partial solar eclipse.
You need
- Two sheets of stiff white card or paper plates
- A square of aluminum foil and some tape
- A pin or a sharp pencil point
- Cut a window. Cut a square hole about 3 cm across in the middle of one card.
- Cover it with foil. Tape the foil smoothly over the hole.
- Poke one small, round hole in the middle of the foil with the pin. Keep it neat; a smaller hole makes a sharper but dimmer image.
- Stand with your back to the sun. Hold the foil card up so sunlight passes through the pinhole, and hold the second card below it as a screen.
- Find the sun. A small round spot of light on the screen is an image of the sun. Move the screen farther away to make the image bigger. During an eclipse, the spot becomes a crescent.
Never look through the pinhole at the sun. The pinhole is for the sun’s light to pass through, onto the screen. Your eyes stay on the screen, with the sun behind you.
How can a tiny hole make a picture? Light travels in straight lines. Light from the top of the sun goes through the hole and lands at the bottom of your screen, and light from the bottom of the sun lands at the top. All those straight lines crossing at the pinhole draw a little upside-down picture of the sun.
Wonder: what shape do you think the spot of light would be if you made the hole square? Try it.
Try this: on any sunny day, look at the round spots of light under a leafy tree. Each one is a picture of the sun. During a partial eclipse, every one of them turns into a crescent.
The next eclipses from Lethbridge
The dates below come from NASA’s eclipse tables prepared by Fred Espenak. Where a table says only “North America”, we’ve worked out what Lethbridge actually sees, with times rounded and given in local time. Check again closer to each date for exact local times.
Solar eclipses
| Date | Type | What Lethbridge sees |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday, January 14, 2029 | Partial | A deep partial eclipse in the morning, low in the southeast. It begins soon after sunrise and peaks around 10 a.m. with roughly three-quarters of the sun covered, ending before noon. Glasses or a projector needed throughout. |
| Wednesday, March 30, 2033 | Partial (total in Alaska) | A partial eclipse in the late morning, peaking just before noon with a bit over half the sun’s width covered, and the sun about 40° up in the southeast. It runs from about 10:50 a.m. to 1 p.m. |
| Monday, August 22, 2044 (evening) | Total | Lethbridge is inside the path of totality. See the next section. |
After 2033, at least two more partial eclipses reach Lethbridge before the big one: June 21, 2039 (mid-morning, about half the sun’s width covered) and November 4, 2040 (late morning, about a third of its width). Not every eclipse that NASA lists for “Canada” or “North America” reaches us. The partial eclipses of August 21, 2036 and July 2, 2038 miss Lethbridge altogether. Check a local calculator nearer the time (see Sources).
Lunar eclipses
| Date (local) | Type | What Lethbridge sees |
|---|---|---|
| Evening of Tuesday, January 11, 2028 | Partial (very small) | A tiny nibble out of the moon’s edge for about an hour, from about 8:45 to 9:40 p.m., with the moon well up in the east. Easy to miss. |
| Evening of Monday, June 25, 2029 | Total | A deep total eclipse, but the moon rises here at about sunset, only about half an hour before totality ends at about 10:15 p.m. The darkened moon will be very low (only a few degrees up) in a bright twilight sky and may be hard to spot, so you’ll need a clear, flat view to the southeast. The partial phase that follows, until about 11:10 p.m., is easier to see as the moon climbs. |
| Late afternoon of Thursday, December 20, 2029 | Total | Totality is over before the moon rises here. The moon comes up in the northeast at about sunset (around 4:30 to 4:40 p.m.) with a bite still missing, until about 5:30 p.m. |
| Early morning of Saturday, October 8, 2033 | Total | The best one: the whole eclipse is visible, with the moon in the southwest to west. The partial phase starts about 3:15 a.m., totality runs about 4:15 to 5:35 a.m., and the partial phase ends about 6:35 a.m. |
What it means for you: if you’ve never seen a total lunar eclipse, mark October 8, 2033 now. It’s a Saturday morning in the Thanksgiving long weekend, and the whole thing is visible from Lethbridge. Our Sky calendar lists the yearly events in between.
The big one: August 22, 2044
On the evening of Monday, August 22, 2044 (August 23 in Universal Time, the date you’ll see in NASA’s tables), the moon’s shadow sweeps across western Canada at sunset. Fred Espenak’s path tables show the path of totality is roughly 480 to 500 km wide as it crosses southern Alberta into Montana, and Lethbridge is inside it.
The catch is that the sun will be very low in the west, less than the width of your fist held at arm’s length above the horizon, and the sun sets at about the same time the partial phase ends. So the eclipse will look spectacular, but you’ll need a clear, open view to the west with no buildings, trees or coulee walls in the way, and no cloud bank over the mountains.
- Glasses or a projector are needed for the hour of partial eclipse before totality, and again the moment totality ends, for the partial phase that lasts until sunset. Only during the short total phase is it safe to look with no protection.
- Plan ahead for busy roads and campgrounds.
What a lunar eclipse looks like
A lunar eclipse is completely safe to watch with your eyes, binoculars or a telescope, for as long as you like. NASA confirms there’s no eye danger at all. It’s slow, quiet and beautiful, and it’s a wonderful thing to share with children if they can stay up.
- Penumbral phase. For the first hour or so, the moon passes through the faint outer shadow. You may notice slight shading, or nothing at all.
- Partial phase. A dark bite appears on the moon’s edge and slowly grows. Notice that the edge of the bite is curved: it’s the shadow of our round Earth. Ancient Greek thinkers used that curve as evidence that Earth is a sphere.
- Totality. The whole moon is inside Earth’s shadow. It doesn’t vanish. It glows orange, copper or deep red, and with the bright full moon dimmed, the stars come out around it.
- Back again. The bite shrinks from the other side, the shading fades, and the full moon is back to normal.
Every total lunar eclipse is a different shade. After big volcanic eruptions, with lots of dust high in the air, the moon can turn very dark; in cleaner air it may glow bright orange.
Why does the moon turn red?
Imagine standing on the moon during the eclipse and looking back at Earth. You’d see Earth blocking the sun, with a thin red-orange ring of light around its edge. That ring is every sunrise and sunset on Earth, all at once. That reddish light bends through our air and onto the moon.
A family idea: during totality, hold up a box of crayons or some paint cards and pick the colour that matches the moon best. Write it down, and compare it with the next eclipse.
Eclipses and the weather
An eclipse happens on its own schedule, whatever the weather. The January 2029 eclipse comes in mid-winter with the sun low in the southeast, so cloud and cold both matter. The 2044 eclipse comes at sunset in late August, when storms over the mountains and wildfire smoke are both possible.
In the days before an eclipse, check the cloud forecast on our forecast page and Environment and Climate Change Canada’s astronomy forecast (see Reading the sky forecast). If clouds threaten, a short drive east or west can be the difference between seeing it and missing it. Leave room in your plans to move.
Standing still in the cold? A morning eclipse in January means an hour or more outdoors at winter temperatures. Dress children warmly; see dressing kids for the cold.
Sources
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Solar Eclipses 2021 to 2030 (dates, types and regions of visibility; F. Espenak): eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Solar Eclipses 2031 to 2040: eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Solar Eclipses 2041 to 2050: eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Lunar Eclipses 2021 to 2030: eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Lunar Eclipses 2031 to 2040: eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov
- Fred Espenak, EclipseWise, Path of the Total Solar Eclipse of 2044 Aug 23 (path limits, central duration and sun altitude over southern Alberta): eclipsewise.com
- Fred Espenak, EclipseWise, Solar Eclipse of 2029 Jan 14 (partial, visible from North America): eclipsewise.com
- Fred Espenak, EclipseWise, lunar eclipse contact times: 2028 Jan 12, 2029 Jun 26, 2029 Dec 20, 2033 Oct 8
- NASA Science, Eclipses (safety is the number one priority; sunglasses are not safe; pinhole projection; lunar eclipses are always safe): science.nasa.gov and NASA’s eclipse safety page: science.nasa.gov/eclipses/safety
- American Astronomical Society, ISO 12312-2 (what the standard covers; ordinary sunglasses): eclipse.aas.org
- American Astronomical Society, How to tell if your eclipse viewers are safe (label not proof, trusted list, indoor and sun tests, damaged viewers): eclipse.aas.org
- Government of Nunavut, Limit your risks during the solar eclipse (no binoculars or cameras with eclipse glasses; supervise children): gov.nu.ca
- Local times for Lethbridge (start, peak and end; when the moon or sun is up; roughly how much of the sun is covered) are our own calculations, rounded. For solar eclipses they are worked out from NASA’s and EclipseWise’s Besselian elements for each eclipse; for lunar eclipses, from the EclipseWise contact times above. You can check any of them for yourself with EclipseWise’s free local calculators: 2029 Jan 14, 2033 Mar 30, 2044 Aug 23 (enter latitude 49.70, longitude -112.84). EclipseWise has the same calculator for every later eclipse, including 2039 and 2040.
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Besselian Elements for the Total Solar Eclipse of 2044 Aug 23: eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov