Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) – On April 8, 2024, many people will be looking up to the sky to get their once-in-a-lifetime chance to view a total solar eclipse. But what is a total solar eclipse?
“It means that the moon is just close enough and at the right angle that it will cover the entire surface of the sun, making the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, visible, which is normally not visible to us because the surface of the sun is so bright,” explained Jen Schecter, Buffalo Museum of Science’s Eclipse Coordinator. “Eclipses don’t happen all the time, because the moon doesn’t have a perfectly spherical orbit, it’s not always lined up. So this is a pretty rare event.”
How rare? Well, for starters, the last total solar eclipse visible to us as Buffalonians was in 1925, and it won’t happen again until the year 2144.
“This is a really special treat for us being in the path of totality, or in that path of the moon shadow where we’ll get complete darkness for about three minutes and forty-five seconds,” Schechter told WBEN on Friday.