2024 Path of Totality

  • Released Tuesday, February 13, 2024
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This visualization closely follows the Moon's umbra shadow as it crosses North America during the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse. It covers the one hour and 50 minutes between 10:57 a.m. Pacific Standard Time and 4:47 p.m. Atlantic Daylight Time. Annotations include a running clock and the location of the center of the shadow. Everyone within the dark oval sees totality.

During the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse, the Moon's umbral shadow will fly across North America, from Mazatlán on the Pacific coast of Mexico to eastern Canada's island of Newfoundland, in a little less than two hours. The path of this shadow, the path of totality, is where observers will see the Moon completely cover the Sun for up to four and a half minutes.

Within the United States, the path touches 15 states: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, the extreme northwest corner of Tennessee, Illinois, far western Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, the extreme southeast corner of Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

For this visualization, the umbra and its path were calculated in a way that accounts for both elevations on the Earth's surface and the irregular lunar limb (the shilhouette edge of the Moon's disk). Both can have surprising effects on the shape of the umbra and the location of the path. Go here to read more about these effects.

Versions of the animation are provided both with and without the text annotations. A selection of still images highlight particular locations along the path.

This visualization closely follows the Moon's umbra shadow as it crosses North America during the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse. It covers the one hour and 50 minutes between 10:57 a.m. Pacific Standard Time and 4:47 p.m. Atlantic Daylight Time. This version omits the annotations.



Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Release date

This page was originally published on Tuesday, February 13, 2024.
This page was last updated on Thursday, October 10, 2024 at 12:15 AM EDT.


Datasets used

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