2018 Solar eclipse
Partial solar eclipse on Aug. 11, 2018
The Aug. 11, 2018 partial solar eclipse willtouch many countries in the Northern Hemisphere. shows the path of the moon's shadow.
The eclipse will start out over the North Atlantic Ocean and Greenland, moving north and east so that the shadow simultaneously moves toward Iceland, northern Europe and the northern polar regions. Continuing its path over the top of the planet, the shadow will be wide enough to cover most of northern Russia from east to west. It will then dip down into Mongolia, China and surrounding areas.
It will officially begin when the moon first appears to make contact with the sun's disk at 4:02 a.m. EDT (0802 GMT). Maximum eclipse will happen at 5:46 a.m. EDT (0946 GMT), when the eclipse is at magnitude 0.7361.
In a partial eclipse, the center of the moon's shadow "misses" the Earth — this is why there's no region of totality. As a result, a quirk of partial eclipses is that the sun is closest to the horizon at the point of the greatest eclipse. This is also why the areas where you can see a partial eclipse occur tend to be near the poles. The phenomenon differs from the partial solar eclipses visible from areas outside the zone of totality, when total solar eclipses occur somewhere on Earth — for example, during theAugust 2017 eclipse eclipse — because, in this case, there is no point 8 the center of the moon's shadow touches the Earth at all.
The partial solar eclipse of July 13, 2018, took place almost entirely over open water. Because the eclipse arrived during the Southern Hemisphere's winter, most of Antarctica was experiencing "polar nights." During these periods, the sun does not rise for days, weeks or months at a time. But the partial solar eclipse briefly passed over the illuminated edge of the continent that lies just south of Australia. Skywatchers on the very southern coasts of Australia and New Zealand had a chance to catch brief views of the eclipse.
This partial eclipse began at 9:48 p.m. EDT on July 13 (0148 GMT on July 12), reaching its maximum magnitude of 0.3367 at 11:01 p.m. EDT (0301 GMT). Eclipse magnitude is what fraction of the sun's diameter is covered by the moon. [