Hopefully, viewing conditions will cooperate for the total solar eclipse on Monday, April 8, 2024, which will cross over portions of Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. NASA is planning airborne and sounding rocket experiments to collect data about the impact of this solar event on our planet, which will add to NASA's archive of data related to Sun-Earth Interactions.
Conditions for viewing the eclipse are guaranteed to be excellent in one location: outer space. If the timing of the eclipse is right—for example, having the eclipse occur at the same time an instrument like the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard the NASA/NOAA NOAA-20 satellite is passing over—the view can be incredible. This true-color corrected reflectance image of a darkened swath due to a solar eclipse over Australia was acquired by the NOAA-20 VIIRS instrument on April 20, 2023.
A total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth, completely blocking the face of the Sun. A darkened section in the reflectance imagery can often occur as the satellite no longer receives reflected sunlight from Earth's surface.
View total solar eclipses from the last decade in NASA Worldview:
- December 14, 2020, South America
- July 2, 2019, Pacific Ocean
- August 21, 2017, North America
- March 8, 2016, Pacific Ocean
- March 20, 2015, European Arctic
- November 3, 2013, western Africa
Visit Worldview to visualize near real-time imagery from NASA's EOSDIS; find more imagery in our Worldview weekly image archive.
Datasets
- VJ102IMG_NRT doi:10.5067/VIIRS/VJ102IMG_NRT.021
- VJ103IMG_NRT doi:10.5067/VIIRS/VJ103IMG_NRT.021
- VJ102MOD_NRT doi:10.5067/VIIRS/VJ102MOD_NRT.021
- VJ102MOD_NRT doi:10.5067/VIIRS/VJ102MOD_NRT.002
