'Ring Of Fire' 2023 Annular Solar Eclipse: What You Need To Know In CT

CONNECTICUT — Most of North America, including Connecticut, will see at least a partial annular solar eclipse on Oct. 14, but won’t get the full “ring of fire” effect. In our state, it will look as if the moon took a bite from the sun.

An annular solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes in front of the sun but is too far from Earth to completely obscure it, leaving the sun’s edges exposed in a red-orange ring, NASA explained. This will be the last time to see an annular solar eclipse in the United States until June 21, 2039, and then it will only be visible in Alaska.

The path for the Oct. eclipse is narrow at only about 125 miles, meaning only parts of Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas will see the ring of fire. In the United States, the annular solar eclipse begins in Oregon at 9:13 a.m. PDT and ends in Texas at 12:03 p.m. CDT.

In these areas, the eclipse will last about 5 minutes and 17 seconds. At the peak, about 91 percent of the sun will be blocked by the moon. The ring of fire effect will only last a few seconds.

People living outside the path won’t see as much of the eclipse, but it’s still worth a look. You’ll need special solar eclipse glasses to view it.

In Greenwich, the southwestern most tip of Connecticut, the partial eclipse begins a 12:10:09 at "02:30 o'clock" on the sun's disk, with a magnitude of 34 percent. In Thompson, the far northeastern corner of the state, the partial eclipse will begin at 12:15:36 and have a magnitude of 30 percent.

The eclipse will be caused by a “micro moon,” when either a new moon, the phase for the Oct. 14 eclipse, or a full moon is at apogee, the point in the moon’s orbit when it is the farthest away from Earth. A micro moon is the opposite of a supermoon. It appears about 4 percent smaller than a regular moon.

Consider this a warm-up for the 2024 total solar eclipse on April 8. About 32 million live in the path of 100 percent totality. That’s portions of Texas, Oklahoma, Maine, Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont and New Hampshire.

Areas farther away from the path of totality will see a less-dramatic blockage of the sun.

The upcoming event is dubbed the Great American Eclipse, a riff off the 2017 Great American Eclipse in which Americans from one coast to the other basked in the subdued sunlight with picnics, watch parties and even solar eclipse weddings. To show how frenzied the run-up was, 1970s Welsh pop star Bonnie Tyler reprised her “Total Eclipse of the Sun” at the exact moment the sun fell under the moon’s shadow on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.