There is set to be a total solar eclipse on the night of April 9, when the Moon will by the Sun, completely covering it. It will happen between 9.13 PM IST on April 9 and 2.22 AM IST on April 10 and it will be visible from Mexico, the Eastern part of the United States South-Eastern Canada.
Unfortunately, no eclipse will be visible to skywatchers in India, according to In the Sky, but you can still watch the eclipse through the various livestreams that will be available at the time
Solar eclipses, like the one next month, happen when the Sun, the Moon and our planet are perfectly aligned in a straight line, in that order. Each time the Moon completes one revolution around the Earth, it comes to the Sky as it passes the New Moon. If the Moon orbited our planet in the same planet that the Earth orbits the Sun, there would be a solar eclipse every month.
But the Moon’s orbit is at an angle of about 5 degrees relative to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Because of this, the alignment between the Moon and the Sun is not always exact. The Moon usually passes a few degrees to the side of the Sun.
Image credit: In the Sky
In the diagram above, the grid represents the plane of Earth’s orbit around the star. The Moon passes through the Earth-Sun plane twice every month as it goes around the Earth. The points where these intersections happen are labelled as nodes. When one of these nodes coincides with the New Moon, we get an eclipse.
And even when these solar eclipses happen, they are not visible to the whole world. Because of the much smaller size of the Moon, the shadow it casts on our planet is never more than a few hundred kilometres wide. And that is essentially what a solar eclipse is —- what is visible to people who are in locations where the Moon’s shadow is passing.
