A Few Nice Eclipse Maps-Part 1

In a month a total eclipse will make its way across North America. On April 8th the path will travel quickly, (under two hours) from Mazatlán on Mexico's Pacific coast to Newfoundland, Canada and then into the Atlantic Ocean. There are some really nice visualizations of the eclipse's path. I'll show two today and more next week. The first one I saw at the last fall's NACIS Conference in Pittsburgh.

 This visualization* by Michala Garrison at NASA, shows both next month's total eclipse and the annular eclipse (where the moon was further from Earth and therefore didn't completely obscure the sun) that occurred on October 14, 2023, right after the conference's end. Garrison spoke at NACIS about how she created this map and you can watch it here. Here is a close up of where the two eclipse paths would intersect (if they were simultaneous) near San Antonio, Texas.

The ovals represent the moon's umbra. If you look closely you can see how she incorporated the city lights visualization. This helps see the urban areas and is also appropriate because it will be dark in along the path for up to a few minutes.

*The linked page does not always load correctly. I’ve found that sometimes you need to reload it once or twice before getting it in a non-text format.

The next visualization is from Andy Woodruff, cartographer and frequent eclipse traveler. This one is a "scrollytelling" visualization. As you scroll downwards the path and umbras move along in time, beginning in Mexico.

The umbra can be moved to any location for a close look at what areas have the most and least coverage.

For reasons that I don't completely understand (maybe the sun's angle) the umbra flattens out as it progresses. By the time it reaches eastern Canada it is much more of an oval.

He also includes this nice, precisely detailed map of the Dallas area where you can see the eclipse's duration by neighborhood.

Woodruff ends his post with some advice and personal experiences from his eclipse travels. I like this map showing past eclipses he's seen with emojis representing the weather for each one.