Total solar eclipse of December 5, 2048

The path of totality

Aysén and Chubut, around noon

Southern Namibia and Botswana, at sunset

Times along the path

Local clock times on Saturday, December 5, in the order totality arrives. Chile's Aysén region and Argentina keep UTC−3; Tristan da Cunha keeps Greenwich Mean Time, UTC+0; Namibia and Botswana keep Central Africa Time, UTC+2. So totality reaches Melinka at 12:01 PM, Comodoro Rivadavia at 12:14 PM, Edinburgh of the Seven Seas at 4:46 PM and Sossusvlei at 7:08 PM, though the shadow takes about two hours from Patagonia to Namibia.

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. Over Aysén and Chubut totality comes around noon with the Sun about 60° to 65° up, so any open spot will do; on Tristan da Cunha the Sun is about 35° up in the late afternoon. In Namibia and Botswana totality comes just before sunset: the Sun is about 5° up at Sossusvlei, 3° at Kalkrand and on the horizon at the Botswana border, low in the west-southwest, so a dune, a hill or haze that way can hide it, and the best places have a clear, flat view to the 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 at both ends it lists only one point for hundreds of kilometres: between the path's sunrise end over the South Pacific and its first timed point, and between its last timed point, off the coast of Namibia, and its sunset end at the Botswana border. 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. 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 over Namibia and Botswana, 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 José de San Martín, Sarmiento, Comodoro Rivadavia and Aminuis 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), 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), February 5, 2046 (New Guinea, Hawaii, Oregon and Idaho) and June 11, 2048 (Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Iceland, Oslo and Stockholm), and the hybrid eclipse of November 14, 2031 (the Pacific and Panama). The next one, the annular eclipse of May 31, 2049, brings a ring of sunlight at sunrise to Piura in Peru, then to Cape Verde, Dakar and the Gambia, northern Ghana, Lagos, Douala and the Congo basin: its path and times. For every other eclipse, solar and lunar, see when the next eclipse is.