Total solar eclipse of August 23, 2044

The path of totality

The Northwest Territories, around 7:15 PM

Alberta, Saskatchewan, Montana and North Dakota, towards sunset

Times along the path

Local clock times on the evening of Monday, August 22, in the order totality arrives. North-west Greenland keeps UTC−1 and Pituffik UTC−3; Grise Fiord keeps Eastern Daylight Time, UTC−4, and Resolute Central Daylight Time, UTC−5; Kugluktuk, the Northwest Territories, Alberta and Montana keep Mountain Daylight Time, UTC−6, the same clock as Saskatchewan, which keeps Central Standard Time all year; British Columbia keeps UTC−7, its north-east all year and the rest on Pacific Daylight Time, except Golden, Fernie and Cranbrook, on Alberta's time; Williston, Minot and the rest of north-west North Dakota keep Central Daylight Time, UTC−5, and Dickinson Mountain. So totality reaches Grise Fiord at 8:51 PM, Fort St. John at 6:30 PM, Calgary at 7:39 PM and Williston at 8:42 PM, though the shadow takes under an hour to get from Greenland to North Dakota.

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.
• Take the glasses off only during totality, once the Sun is completely covered, and put them back on as soon as the first bright light returns. Outside the path of totality the glasses stay on the whole time.
• 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 the partial phases 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. The Sun is low everywhere on this path: on the horizon at Kullorsuaq, 4° to 9° up at Pituffik, Grise Fiord and Resolute, about 16° over the Northwest Territories, 13° at Grande Prairie, 9° at Calgary and 5° at Havre, then 3° or less from Glasgow east to North Dakota, where totality comes as the Sun touches the horizon. Mountains, hills, trees and buildings can hide it, so choose a spot with a clear, low view to the west: north-west over Greenland, west-northwest from Saskatchewan to North Dakota. In the Rockies, at Banff or Jasper, that means an open valley or a lake shore facing west. A low Sun is still too bright to look at: the glasses stay on until totality, even at sunset.

How these times are worked out

The path, its width and the greatest eclipse come from NASA's predictions by Fred Espenak (GSFC). NASA's table gives the edges every two minutes of the shadow's run, but near the ends it lists only one point for hundreds of kilometres: the southern edge's last timed point is on the British Columbia–Alberta border and its sunset end in south-east Montana. There the edge between NASA's points is traced with Astronomy Engine, the same computation that gives each place its times, and so are the band's two ends, where the Sun stands on the horizon: over Greenland it is setting at midnight, over North Dakota at the end of the evening. 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, and within about 10 km of an edge they read "up to". With the Sun this low, the air bends its light by about half a degree, so where the Sun is on the horizon the times can be a little off. If your spot is near an edge, as Behchokǫ̀, Enterprise and Cranbrook are, check NASA's map before you travel, and go towards the red line for the longest totality.

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), July 13, 2037 (Australia and New Zealand), December 26, 2038 (South Australia, Victoria and New Zealand), December 15, 2039 (Antarctica), April 30, 2041 (Angola, Uganda and Kenya) and April 20, 2042 (Sumatra, Borneo and the Philippines), 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), March 9, 2035 (New Zealand), January 5, 2038 (Cuba, the Caribbean and West Africa), July 2, 2038 (Colombia, Venezuela and the Sahara), June 21, 2039 (Alaska, Scandinavia and the Baltic), October 25, 2041 (Shenyang, central Japan and Kiribati) and October 14, 2042 (Thailand, Canberra and New Zealand), and the hybrid eclipse of November 14, 2031 (the Pacific and Panama). The next one, the annular eclipse of February 16, 2045, crosses New Zealand from Fiordland to Christchurch, Wellington and Gisborne around midday on February 17, local time, and the southern Cook Islands with Rarotonga: its path and times. For every other eclipse, solar and lunar, see when the next eclipse is.