Annular solar eclipse of May 31, 2049

The path of the ring

Piura and southern Ecuador, at sunrise

Cape Verde, Senegal and the Gambia, early afternoon

Ghana to Cameroon, late afternoon

Times along the path

Local clock times on Monday, May 31, in the order the ring arrives. Peru and Ecuador keep UTC−5; Suriname UTC−3; Cape Verde UTC−1; Senegal, the Gambia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Togo Greenwich Mean Time, UTC; Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon and the west of DR Congo West Africa Time, UTC+1; and the east of DR Congo and Burundi Central Africa Time, UTC+2. So the ring reaches Piura at 7:03 AM, Dakar at 2:42 PM, Lagos at 4:35 PM and Bujumbura at 5:53 PM, though the shadow takes under four hours from Peru to Lake Tanganyika.

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 tenth 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 Piura the ring comes soon after sunrise, with the Sun about 8° up, low in the east-northeast, so hills or buildings that way can hide it. Over Cape Verde, Senegal and Mali it comes in the early afternoon with the Sun high, 47° to 76° up, and over Nigeria and Cameroon in the late afternoon, 21° to 32° up in the west-northwest. Over the Congo basin the Sun sinks lower, about 12° up at Mbandaka and 4° at Kindu, and at Lake Tanganyika it sits on the horizon, so only a clear view west over the lake shows 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 at both ends, off Peru at sunrise and over the Congo basin and Lake Tanganyika 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 Peru and Lake Tanganyika, 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 Sullana, Paita, Jaén, Zamora, Lagos, Port Harcourt and Ebolowa 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), August 2, 2046 (Brazil, Angola, Botswana, South Africa and Eswatini) and December 5, 2048 (Aysén, Chubut, Tristan da Cunha and Namibia), 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 hybrid eclipse of November 25, 2049, brings a ring of sunlight at sunrise to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, then a few seconds to half a minute of totality to the Maldives, southern Sumatra, Borneo and Sulawesi: its path and times. For every other eclipse, solar and lunar, see when the next eclipse is.