Annular solar eclipse of March 9–10, 2035

The path of the ring

Nelson, Cook Strait, Wellington and the Wairarapa, in the late morning

Times along the path

Local clock times, in the order the ring arrives. Over New Zealand the ring takes about six minutes to cross from Westport, at 10:50 AM, to the Wairarapa coast, on the morning of Saturday, March 10. Reao lies east of the date line, so its clocks still read Friday, March 9: the ring reaches it at 2:01 PM there, about three hours after it leaves New Zealand.

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. Over New Zealand the ring comes in the late morning with the Sun some 36 to 40° up in the north-east, so a view clear of hills and buildings to the north-east will do. In eastern Australia the partial eclipse comes soon after sunrise, low in the east.

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 5 seconds. Predictions that follow the Moon's edge in detail can still come a few seconds shorter. Near sunrise and sunset the shadow moves 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. The path is narrow: if your spot is near an edge, as Wellington, Lower Hutt and Castlepoint are, check NASA's map before you travel, and go towards the red line for the full ring.

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), November 25, 2030 (South Africa and Australia), March 30, 2033 (Alaska) and March 20, 2034 (Nigeria to Kashmir), the annular eclipses of January 26, 2028 (the Amazon, Portugal and Spain), June 1, 2030 (Greece, Istanbul, Siberia and Hokkaido), May 21, 2031 (Tanzania, southern India, Sri Lanka and Malaysia) and September 12, 2034 (northern Chile to southern Brazil), and the hybrid eclipse of November 14, 2031 (the Pacific and Panama). The next one, the total eclipse of September 2, 2035, crosses northern China through Beijing, North Korea and central Japan: its path and times. For every other eclipse, solar and lunar, see when the next eclipse is.