• joshthewaster@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    3 months ago

    The annular one over north America? Because it was annular. While a cool event it is really a specific kind of partial eclipse. Totality is incomparable to even a 99% partial eclipse. I heard it described as the difference between mostly dead VS dead and recently I’ve seen the xkcd comic that does a decent job conveying the difference too.

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          3 months ago

          If you didn’t know, you’d expect a 91% eclipse to almost look like a full eclipse. (I think his idea was you got close enough that it was over 90%.) But the sun is so bright that it still looks like day at 91%. You might not even realize there is an eclipse unless you looked at it with glasses.

          When I saw it two days ago, even at 99% everything still looked normal. It was only a tiny bit darker outside. You still needed to use glasses to see that an eclipse was happening.

          When it hit 100% it was like lights being turned out in a room. In place of the sun was a giant black disk with a multicolored glow around it and a bright red spot (solar flare was happening at the time).