2024 Path of Totality

Released Tuesday, February 13, 2024

ID: 5219

- Visualizations by:
- Ernie Wright

This visualization closely follows the Moon's umbra shadow as it crosses North America during the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse. It covers the one hour and 50 minutes between 10:57 a.m. Pacific Standard Time and 4:47 p.m. Atlantic Daylight Time. Annotations include a running clock and the location of the center of the shadow. Everyone within the dark oval sees totality.

During the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse, the Moon's umbral shadow will fly across North America, from Mazatlán on the Pacific coast of Mexico to eastern Canada's island of Newfoundland, in a little less than two hours. The path of this shadow, the path of totality, is where observers will see the Moon completely cover the Sun for up to four and a half minutes.

Within the United States, the path touches 15 states: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, the extreme northwest corner of Tennessee, Illinois, far western Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, the extreme southeast corner of Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

For this visualization, the umbra and its path were calculated in a way that accounts for both elevations on the Earth's surface and the irregular lunar limb (the shilhouette edge of the Moon's disk). Both can have surprising effects on the shape of the umbra and the location of the path. Go here to read more about these effects.

Versions of the animation are provided both with and without the text annotations. A selection of still images highlight particular locations along the path.

18:09:36 UTC (11:09:36 a.m. PST) Mazatlán

18:18:56 UTC (12:18:56 p.m. CST) Torreón

18:34:14 UTC (1:34:14 p.m. CDT) Kerrville, San Antonio

18:37:22 UTC (1:37:22 p.m. CDT) Killeen, Austin

18:42:26 UTC (1:42:26 p.m. CDT) Dallas, Fort Worth

18:52:38 UTC (1:52:38 p.m. CDT) Little Rock

19:01:18 UTC (2:01:18 p.m. CDT) Carbondale

19:07:50 UTC (3:07:50 p.m. EDT) Indianapolis

19:15:32 UTC (3:15:32 p.m. EDT) Cleveland

19:21:00 UTC (3:21:00 p.m. EDT) Buffalo, Rochester

19:27:42 UTC (3:27:42 p.m. EDT) Montreal, Burlington

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Visualizers
- Ernie Wright (USRA)
- Michala Garrison (SSAI)
Technical support
- Laurence Schuler (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
- Ian Jones (ADNET Systems, Inc.)

This page was originally published on Tuesday, February 13, 2024.
This page was last updated on Thursday, October 10, 2024 at 12:15 AM EDT.

Datasets used

DEM [SRTM: SIR-C]
ID: 481

Sensor: SIR-C

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BMNG (Blue Marble: Next Generation) [Terra and Aqua: MODIS]
ID: 508

Sensor: MODIS

Credit: The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).

This dataset can be found at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/
See all pages that use this dataset
DEM (Digital Elevation Map) [LRO: LOLA]
ID: 653

Sensor: LOLA

See all pages that use this dataset