Brought to you by Starry Night

Sunday, July 30

This afternoon, skywatchers in the northwestern parts of North America will be witness to a partial solar eclipse. More specifically, anyone located on a line from San Francisco, across Idaho, and up to and beyond Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, will see part of the sun covered by the moon.

Greatest eclipse occurs at 2:13 UT (6:13 p.m., Pacific Time).

Unfortunately, the eclipse begins at sunset for people located south of San Francisco, northwestern Nevada and Wyoming, as well as the northwestern corner of North Dakota. People in northern California, central Oregon and the northwestern corner of Montana will see maximum eclipse at sunset.

In southern and central Alaska, maximum eclipse (30 percent of the solar disk will be obscured) occurs between 5:45 and 6 p.m.

As always, take commonsense precautions when observing the sun. Either project it through a small telescope (cap the finder scope!) or use the pinhole-projection method. Puncture a clean hole in a piece of cardboard using a pencil point and allow the sun to pass through the hole and onto a white card held a foot or two behind it. This creates a tiny image of the sun's partially occulted disk.

An interesting thing to do during a partial or total eclipse is to note the shadows cast by leaves, or even the spaces between your fingers when held in a crosshatched pattern. Sunlight passing through the openings creates a natural pinhole camera array, projecting images of the eclipse onto the ground or a handy wall.

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Jeff Kanipe is the author of A Skywatcher's Year, an astronomy guide just published by Cambridge University Press. He is a former editor at Astronomy and StarDate magazines and a writer for the Earth & Sky radio series.

The images in Skywatch are produced by Starry Night software.