Say- What's That Hole In The Sky?

 It came and went, and it was spectacular.

Monday, April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse swept along Eastern Ontario. It wasn’t one of those puny partial eclipses you might have seen over the years (the last partial eclipse in Ottawa was August 21, 2017); a total solar eclipse is a different beast all together, complete with 'nightfall' in mid-afternoon, dropping temperatures, and an unparalleled encounter with a nearby star (that would be our Sun).

Those lucky enough not to have cloud cover saw a black hole in the sky as the moon moved between the earth and the sun. We saw filaments of the sun's corona streaming into space; we see stars and planets in the middle of the day. We saw the moon’s massive shadow approach from one horizon, then pass overhead before receding into the distance.

The path of totality - when the moon completely blocks the sun - was 170 km wide, and the northern edge of the path lay between Ottawa and the 401 (more specifically, it is about 5 kms south of Kemptville). Belleville, Kingston, Brockville, Cornwall and Montreal's south shore got a total eclipse. In southern Ontario,  Hamilton and Niagara Falls got the real deal; Toronto, not quite. Along the 401 in Eastern Ontario, the duration of totality was a bit more than two minutes. In Kingston, where I was, totality lasted 2 minutes and 51 seconds.

(The centre of the path ran through Buffalo, Rochester and Watertown, New York. Each of those places got about three and a half minutes of mid-afternoon darkness. Anomalies abound: downtown Montreal got totality; Laval dind’t).

Once the moon completely covered the sun, we looked on with the naked eye, because there were no harmful solar rays to damage your retina. The effect of a total solar eclipse was stunning. The temperature dipped, the afternoon got noticeably quieter as birds stopped foraging, and you got a glimpse of the spectacular effect called 'Baily's beads', when glimmers of the sun's rays reach earth through the valleys and uneven terrain of the surface of the moon.

On average, any given point on earth gets a total solar eclipse every 360 years, so the fact that we – at least in southern Ontario and Quebec - get to see one in our lifetime is a fortuitous treat.

Check out the path of totality here; zoom right in on the map to see how clsoe yopu were.

 Tom New