Annular solar eclipse of February 5, 2046

The path of the ring

New Guinea and Bougainville, early on Tuesday morning

Hawaii, early on Monday afternoon

Northern California, Oregon and Idaho, at sunset

Times along the path

Local clock times in the order the ring arrives. New Guinea, Bougainville and the Solomon Islands are west of the date line, so their times fall early on Tuesday, February 6; Hawaii keeps UTC−10, California, Nevada and most of Oregon Pacific Standard Time, UTC−8, and south-west Idaho with Ontario, Oregon, Mountain Standard Time, UTC−7, so theirs fall on Monday, February 5. So the ring reaches Buka at 8:22 AM on Tuesday and Kahului at 2:08 PM on Monday, though the shadow takes less than three hours 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: even at its middle about a sixth 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. A Sun low on the horizon still needs the glasses: it can be bright even when it looks dim through haze. Over Hawaii the ring comes in the early afternoon with the Sun about 47° up; over New Guinea it comes soon after sunrise, and over California, Oregon and Idaho just before sunset, with the Sun low in the west-southwest, so a hill, trees or buildings that way can hide it.

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 but leaves long gaps where the path meets land at sunrise over New Guinea and at sunset over Oregon and Idaho; there the edges, and the path's two ends, are traced with Astronomy Engine, the same computation that gives each place its times. That computation 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 Honolulu, Hilo, Wamena and Susanville 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), August 23, 2044 (Alberta, Montana and North Dakota) and August 12, 2045 (California to Florida, the Caribbean and Brazil), 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), October 14, 2042 (Thailand, Canberra and New Zealand) and February 16, 2045 (New Zealand and Rarotonga), and the hybrid eclipse of November 14, 2031 (the Pacific and Panama). The next one, the total eclipse of August 2, 2046, comes at sunrise over Aracaju and Maceió in Brazil, then crosses Angola, northern Botswana, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and Eswatini from late morning to early afternoon: its path and times. For every other eclipse, solar and lunar, see when the next eclipse is.