Annular solar eclipse of January 5, 2038

The path of the ring

Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the Windward Islands, in the early morning

West Africa, in the afternoon

Times along the path

Local clock times, in the order the ring arrives. Cuba's and Haiti's clocks run an hour behind those of the Dominican Republic and the Windward Islands, so the ring reaches Santiago de Cuba at 7:04 AM, Port-au-Prince at 7:05 AM and Barahona at 8:05 AM, at almost the same moment. In West Africa, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Togo keep Greenwich time and Benin, Nigeria and Niger are an hour ahead: the ring reaches Daloa at 2:48 PM, Tamale at 3:00 PM and Zinder at 4:16 PM.

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 Haiti and the Dominican Republic the ring comes soon after sunrise with the Sun low in the east-southeast, so choose a spot with a clear view that way; over the Windward Islands the Sun is some 20 to 25° up. In West Africa it comes in the afternoon with the Sun in the south-west, some 45° up in Côte d'Ivoire and lower further east, about 24° at Zinder.

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. 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, as over Cuba and Haiti; each place's own answer comes from Astronomy Engine. The path is narrow: if your spot is near an edge, as Castries, Bondoukou and Sokoto 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), March 20, 2034 (Nigeria to Kashmir), September 2, 2035 (Beijing, North Korea and Japan) and July 13, 2037 (Australia and New Zealand), 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), September 12, 2034 (northern Chile to southern Brazil) and March 9, 2035 (New Zealand), and the hybrid eclipse of November 14, 2031 (the Pacific and Panama). The next one, the annular eclipse of July 2, 2038, crosses Colombia, Venezuela, the south of Barbados and the Sahara: its path and times. For every other eclipse, solar and lunar, see when the next eclipse is.