The 2023 eclipse is an annular solar eclipse, which occurs when the moon is farthest away from the Earth. A “ring of fire” will be created in the sky when the eclipse reaches its peak on Saturday.
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00:00 The moon, the earth, and the sun are all going around in space, right?
00:07 And so earth is orbiting around the sun.
00:10 Meanwhile, the moon is going around earth.
00:13 And sometimes we all just by chance kind of line up in a line.
00:23 So I'm Morgan McLeod.
00:24 I'm an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
00:30 So a solar eclipse is when the moon in the sky blocks all or part of the sun.
00:38 And we have an eclipse coming up this fall on October 14, 2023.
00:43 It's what's called an annular eclipse.
00:46 Annular means ring.
00:47 And so what's going to happen is that the moon is going to cross perfectly in front
00:53 of the sun.
00:54 And something you may have noticed is both the moon and the sun look about the same size
00:59 in our sky.
01:01 And that's not because they're the same size.
01:04 They're different sizes and different distances away.
01:06 So the moon is much closer and much smaller.
01:09 And the sun is much bigger and much further away.
01:11 They're about a half degree in angle.
01:14 It's about the size of a fingernail on the sky.
01:17 What that means is that the moon is about the right size to block the sun if it's lined
01:24 up just right.
01:27 A total eclipse is when the moon is perfectly blocking the sun on the sky and it completely
01:34 blocks the glowing hot disk of the sun.
01:38 And all we see is the atmosphere around the sun.
01:43 We're seeing the sun's extremely hot million degree atmosphere.
01:48 It's actually hotter than the surface of the sun.
01:50 The surface of the sun is about 5,000 degrees, but its atmosphere is close to a million.
01:56 An annular eclipse is what would be a total eclipse, but it's at its furthest point in
02:03 its orbit.
02:04 It's closer to 400,000 kilometers away than its average of 380,000.
02:11 It's a little bit too small to cover the entire sun.
02:16 And what we'll see instead is a ring of bright sun around the outside and most of the sun
02:23 blocked out by the moon.
02:25 When you see that with just your eyes, you know, the sun is so bright, it's hard to see
02:29 what's going on.
02:30 But if you have either a pinhole projector or eclipse glasses, you can see a perfect
02:36 ring of lit up sun just behind the moon.
02:42 And so unlike a lunar eclipse where you can see anywhere that it's nighttime, a solar
02:46 eclipse, you have to be just in the right spot on the earth.
02:51 And so people will travel all over the earth just to be in the path of a solar eclipse.
02:56 The path of the moon blocking the sun is narrow on earth.
03:00 And so it's a narrow path that will see a total eclipse, a much bigger path that will
03:05 see a partial eclipse.
03:07 So even if an eclipse is total somewhere, it's partial somewhere else.
03:12 So just being a few cities away might be enough that you're not like aligned enough and you
03:20 would see a partial instead of a total eclipse.
03:24 Now to get that kind of perfect alignment with a perfect ring, you have to be right
03:29 in the path of that.
03:31 The path of that eclipse, it passes through Texas, for example, where I live in Massachusetts,
03:36 we'll see a partial eclipse.
03:38 So the moon will miss a little bit, but it'll partially block out the sun's light.
03:44 And the part where the moon perfectly blocks out the sun is only a couple of minutes long.
03:52 But it's supposedly a completely amazing moment because rather than just our sun's normal
04:00 bright disk, you get to see its hot outer atmosphere that's normally glowing.
04:06 Most of that energy is coming off as x-rays and you see it's sort of stringy outer atmosphere.
04:12 For just a moment, it becomes night in the middle of the day and all the animals react
04:17 and it's this kind of amazing thing.
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