Annular solar eclipse of June 11, 2048

The path of the ring

Kansas to Lake Huron, from sunrise

Iceland, around midday

Norway, Sweden and the Baltic, in the afternoon

Times along the path

Local clock times on Thursday, June 11, in the order the ring arrives. Colorado and Goodland keep Mountain Daylight Time, UTC−6; the rest of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin Central Daylight Time, UTC−5; Michigan, Ontario and Quebec Eastern Daylight Time, UTC−4; Labrador UTC−3; southern Greenland UTC−1; Iceland UTC; Norway and Sweden UTC+2; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and western Russia UTC+3, and Astrakhan UTC+4; Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan UTC+5; and Afghanistan UTC+4:30. So the ring reaches Omaha at 6:26 AM, Reykjavík at 12:43 PM, Stockholm at 3:33 PM and Kabul at 6:57 PM, though the shadow takes about three hours from Kansas to Afghanistan.

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 an eighth 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 Kansas and Nebraska the ring comes soon after sunrise, with the Sun 1° at Goodland and 6° up at Omaha, low in the east-northeast, so a hill, trees or buildings that way can hide it. Over Iceland, Norway and Sweden it comes in the afternoon with the Sun 43° to 48° up, and over Afghanistan just before sunset, low in the west-northwest.

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 at both ends, over the Great Plains at sunrise and over Central Asia at sunset; 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". With the Sun this low over Kansas and Afghanistan, 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 Milwaukee, Val-d’Or, Labrador City, Drammen, Šiauliai and Urgench 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), August 12, 2045 (California to Florida, the Caribbean and Brazil) and August 2, 2046 (Brazil, Angola, Botswana, South Africa and Eswatini), 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), February 16, 2045 (New Zealand and Rarotonga) and February 5, 2046 (New Guinea, Hawaii, Oregon and Idaho), and the hybrid eclipse of November 14, 2031 (the Pacific and Panama). The next one, the total eclipse of December 5, 2048, comes around noon over Aysén in Chile and Chubut in Argentina with Comodoro Rivadavia, then crosses Tristan da Cunha and reaches southern Namibia at sunset: its path and times. For every other eclipse, solar and lunar, see when the next eclipse is.