Solar Eclipse, August 1, 2008

Image from the NASA Eclipse Web Site

If you live in a narrow band of the Northern Hemisphere extending from Canada across Northern Europe through Russia, Mongolia, and China (as illustrated above), you have a chance of seeing a total eclipse of the Sun this coming Friday, August 1. If you live in a much larger band that covers parts of extreme northeastern North America, much of Europe (sorry, Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy and Greece!), all of mainland Asia, India, and parts of the Arabian Peninsula, you have a chance of seeing a partial solar eclipse.

There's a lot of good stuff about this eclipse online. Rather than try to rehash it, I'll just point you to some of the sites:

NASA's Eclipse Page for the Total Eclipse of August 1, 2008
An excellent site with tons of images and links. Part of the NASA Eclipse Web Site.

Wikipedia page for Solar Eclipse of August 1, 2008
Well, it's Wikipedia, so everything should be taken with a grain silo of salt. Still, it has (at this moment) some nice animations and cool links. Including...

A very cool interactive Google map that shows you what you will see - and when!

The World Clock - for converting all those UTC timings to your own local time.

If you can see this, I encourage you to. Eclipses are rare and amazing things. Please share it with your friends. Just be sure to view the eclipse safely - except during those few seconds of totality, you need to protect your eyes from the sun's rays. Here are some ways of doing it.