How to view the partial solar eclipse in Ottawa
The skies are about to get darker on Monday afternoon as a partial solar eclipse passes over the National Capital Region.
But don’t worry, even if animals begin acting strangely, it won’t last for long.
The last time eastern Ontario experienced something close to this type of solar eclipse was an annular eclipse — when the sun and moon line up, but the moon appears smaller so the sun looks like a ring — in the early 1990s.
While eclipses are actually quite common, happening up to twice a year, the shadow track is so small that someone would have to travel to the exact part of the Earth where it’s happening, said David Hanes, with the Department of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy at Queen’s University. He drove down to Nashville, Tenn., to get the best view.
60 per cent of sun covered in Ottawa
Ottawa will get about 60 per cent coverage, leaving between 35 and 40 per cent of the sun to shine through. And that’s actually more than enough for someone not to notice much of a difference, because the change is so gradual.
Total coverage will extend across a large swath of the U.S. — from Oregon to South Carolina — for the first time in nearly a century.
“It gets dark, kind of like twilight, but not twilight … When you’re looking at the sun, the sun itself is gone. It’s just a black dot, a black circle. But around the sun, you’d be able to see the corona, which is the atmosphere of the sun and then that would only last about 2 to 3 minutes,” Jesse Rogerson, an astrophysicist and science advisor at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum, told CBC Radio’s In Town and Out.