Annular solar eclipse of May 21, 2031

The path of the ring

Southern India and Sri Lanka, around midday

Tanzania and Zanzibar, in the morning

Times along the path

Local clock times, in the order the ring arrives. It reaches southern Angola at sunrise, Lubumbashi and Tanzania in the morning, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka around 1 PM, Malaysia and Sarawak late in the afternoon and Maluku at sunset, nearly four hours after it began.

Near the path: a partial eclipse

Watching it safely

• Look at the Sun only through eclipse glasses or a handheld solar viewer made to the ISO 12312-2 standard. Ordinary sunglasses, however dark, are not safe.
• An annular eclipse never covers the whole Sun, so the glasses stay on the whole time, during the ring too.
• Never look through a camera, binoculars or a telescope without a solar filter fitted over the front, even while wearing eclipse glasses.
• Without glasses, watch it indirectly: a pinhole in a card, or the holes of a colander, projects the crescent and then the ring onto the ground with the Sun behind you.

This follows NASA's eclipse safety guidance. In Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka the ring comes around 1 PM with the Sun some 68 to 76° up, nearly overhead, so almost any open spot will do. In Tanzania it comes in the morning with the Sun some 20 to 30° up in the east, and in Malaysia and Borneo in the late afternoon with the Sun 20 to 38° up in the west, so choose a spot with a clear view that way.

How these times are worked out

The path, its width and the greatest eclipse come from NASA's predictions by Fred Espenak (GSFC). The times for each place are computed with Astronomy Engine, which treats the Sun and Moon as smooth spheres. NASA notes that the Moon's mountains and valleys shift the edges of the path by 1 to 3 km and change the duration by 1 to 3 seconds, so durations here are rounded down to 10 seconds. Predictions that follow the Moon's edge in detail can still come a few seconds shorter. In the first minutes after sunrise the shadow races across Angola faster than NASA's table, with a row every two minutes, can follow, so the map draws the path's edges there as straight lines; each place's own answer comes from Astronomy Engine. If your spot is near an edge, as Chingola, Njombe, Dindigul, Rameswaram, George Town and Narathiwat are, check NASA's map before you travel.

The eclipses before this one have their own paths and times: the total solar eclipses of August 2, 2027 (southern Spain, North Africa and Egypt), July 22, 2028 (Australia and New Zealand) and November 25, 2030 (South Africa and Australia), and the annular eclipses of January 26, 2028 (the Amazon, Portugal and Spain) and June 1, 2030 (Greece, Istanbul, Siberia and Hokkaido). The next one, the hybrid eclipse of November 14, 2031, is total over the open Pacific and ends as a brief ring at sunset over Panama: its path and times. For every other eclipse, solar and lunar, see when the next eclipse is.