I’ve just discovered that my brother's house is right in the sweet spot for a total solar eclipse in August. Almost immediately afterwards I discovered that my mother has already bagged his spare room for the occasion.
My solar eclipse discovery was made thanks to the Solar Eclipse Map, a smart new interactive tool that helps you explore the paths of every solar eclipse visible between 1900 and 2100. More importantly, it shows something most eclipse maps ignore: not simply whether you are in or out of the path of totality, but exactly how much of the Sun will be covered where you plan to be standing.
Traditional eclipse maps tend to draw a narrow corridor for totality and leave everyone else outside the line with little context. The Solar Eclipse Map instead uses shaded contour bands in 10% increments, so you can instantly see whether your hometown will get a dramatic 95% eclipse, a modest 40% bite, or the full lights-out celestial spectacle. For example, even if I'm forced to watch the August solar eclipse from London I will still experience a 91% eclipse.
Select an eclipse and the globe rotates to centre it. Switch into Shadow mode and you can watch the Moon’s shadow race across the Earth in real time. A time slider lets you scrub forwards and backwards through the event, turning each eclipse into a miniature animated story.
There are thoughtful extras throughout the Solar Eclipse Map: different map projections, city labels, downloadable screenshots, and even video export. Behind the slick presentation is serious astronomical data, based on Fred Espenak’s NASA eclipse canon, but the genius of the project lies in making that data intuitive and fun to explore.
