Total solar eclipse of March 30, 2033

The path of totality

Times along the path

Alaska clock times, in the order totality arrives. The shadow sweeps from St. Lawrence Island to Prudhoe Bay in about a quarter of an hour.

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.
• Inside the path, take the glasses off only once the Moon hides the Sun's bright face completely, and put them back on as soon as any bright Sun reappears.
• Outside the path the Sun is never fully covered, so the glasses stay on the whole time, even at 99%.
• 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 Sun onto the ground with the Sun behind you.

This follows NASA's eclipse safety guidance. Over Alaska the eclipse comes on a late-March morning with the Sun low in the east, about 8° up in Nome and 11° in Utqiagvik during totality, so choose a spot with a clear, low 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. Near the southern edge the two predictions differ by more: at Coldfoot, Astronomy Engine gives a second or two of totality where NASA's edge lies about 13 km to the north. Within about 25 km of the edge, as at Bettles, expect less totality than shown here, or none, and check NASA's map before you travel. The path's northern edge stays over Chukotka and the Arctic Ocean, so every place in Alaska north and west of the southern edge sees totality.

The eclipse before this 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. The next one, the total eclipse of March 20, 2034, crosses Nigeria, Chad, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and Kashmir: its path and times. For every other eclipse, solar and lunar, see when the next eclipse is.