Annular solar eclipse of February 16, 2045

The path of the ring

New Zealand, just before midday

Times along the path

Local clock times in the order the ring arrives. New Zealand is on daylight time, UTC+13, so its times fall on Friday, February 17, a little before noon; the Cook Islands keep UTC−10, the far side of the date line, so theirs fall on the afternoon of Thursday, February 16. So the ring reaches Wellington at 11:51 AM on Friday and Rarotonga at 2:20 PM on Thursday, though the shadow takes only about an hour and a half to get from one to the other.

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. This ring is thick: even at its middle about a seventh of the Sun still shines, enough to hurt the eyes.
• 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 close to midday in late summer, with the Sun high in the north, 46° up at Milford Sound and 53° at Wellington, so hills rarely hide it; over Rarotonga it comes in the early afternoon with the Sun 66° up.

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, and within about 10 km of an edge they read "up to". Predictions that follow the Moon's edge in detail can still come a few seconds shorter. If your spot is near an edge, as Queenstown, Tākaka, Whanganui and Mauke are, check NASA's map before you travel, and go towards the red line for the longest 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), 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), April 20, 2042 (Sumatra, Borneo and the Philippines) and August 23, 2044 (Alberta, Montana and North Dakota), 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 total eclipse of August 12, 2045, crosses the United States from northern California to Florida, then the Bahamas, Hispaniola, Trinidad, Guyana and north-east Brazil: its path and times. For every other eclipse, solar and lunar, see when the next eclipse is.