Highlights From the ‘Ring of Fire’ Solar Eclipse at Sunrise

Thursday morning a few lucky or intrepid humans scattered from Siberia to northern Canada got the chance to see the old familiar sun mostly blotted out from the sky. The cosmos will do that for you from time to time as the ceaseless wanderings of our planet, the sun and moon bring them into line like billiard balls on a velvet space table.

The result this morning was an annular solar eclipse.

During such an eclipse, the black silhouette of the moon — too far from Earth to completely cover the sun — will be surrounded by a thin ring of our home star’s surface, or photosphere. Astronomers call it a “ring of fire.”

This was an eclipse chaser’s eclipse, and not an easy one to casually see in its complete wonder. It started after sunrise north of Lake Superior and began crossing remote regions of Canada on its way into Greenland and the Arctic Ocean before going over the North Pole. Its course then headed south before ending in parts of the Russian Far East. Outside of the path, some viewers experience a partial solar eclipse, like in metropolitan New York where the sun was about 73% obscured shortly after dawn.

In order to experience the terrible and beautiful effects of this moment of cosmic geometry, some astronomers were organized enough to book airplane flights into the zone of maximum darkness or watch from sky-high perches in midtown Manhattan. Others of us pried ourselves and our children out of bed before dawn, hoping against hope that dire weather forecasts were wrong and we would all experience a sense of cosmic citizenship

Clouds hung on the horizon in Manhattan at sunrise, creating challenges for eclipse viewers at ground level. But the weather did not interfere with the enthusiasm of about 25 guests who had begun arriving at the Empire State Building at 4:30 a.m. Thursday.

It was dark and windy as the visitors spread out across the 86th floor observation deck, 1,050 feet above midtown Manhattan, adjusting camera lenses and perfecting positions as they waited for the sun to appear.

When the sky began to lighten and clouds turned shades of fuchsia pink, the event’s attendees, who had paid $114.81 each to be there, could be overheard begging the skyline to clear up so there would be a better view.

Everyone’s eyes were trained on a patch of horizon between two other iconic skyscrapers: the MetLife and Chrysler buildings.

Finally, the sun rose, and the eclipse was visible — if a little hazily — through the cloud cover.

“You could hear the entire audience react at the first viewing of the sun,” said Jean-Yves Ghazi, president of the Empire State Building Observatory. “Everybody was gasping, and it was absolutely magical.”

In the Summit One Vanderbilt observatory in midtown, nearly 1,400 feet up, Katherine Troche of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York and some friends watched the first 20 minutes of the eclipse before a thick fleet of clouds overtook the sky.

“Then the 'Oohs’ and 'Aahs’ turned into ‘Aww, mans,’” she said.

But in the opinion of Troche, who lives in Elmhurst, Queens, her group caught the best part of the eclipse: the devil’s horns effect. When the red horns appeared in the sky, some of her fellow eclipse-watchers yelled in wonder and excitement.

While some people went vertical in Manhattan, others left the city in the hopes of getting a better view.

Mike Kentrianakis, a lifelong eclipse chaser, watched the eclipse in Greece, New York. There, he saw the two horns of the eclipse rise above Lake Ontario like a double sunrise.

“It was brilliant, like a molten-lava cauldron above the deep-blue ripply waves,” said Kentrianakis, who was too excited to sleep the night before. He said the sky seemed to make the birds go berserk, flying wildly across the sky. He kept his eyes glued to his camera screen for the entire eclipse, pausing only once to give two eclipse glasses to a pair of people he noticed watching the sky through their fingers.

“I’m overjoyed right now,” he said. “And I’m going to carry this pleasure inside me for days.”

Jay Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College, has chased eclipses all over the world and was not planning to miss this one.

He; his wife, Naomi; and about 30 others boarded a three-hour Delta flight out of Minneapolis into the darkness and back. The trip was sponsored by Sky & Telescope magazine and led by Kelly Beatty, a senior editor of the magazine.

Seats on the plane went for up to $3,100, according to a price list.

The plane flew to 39,000 feet and was 5,000 feet above the clouds, giving the Pasachoffs and their fellow passengers a lengthy view of the eclipse.

“We were able to see the eclipsed sun for about a half-hour, with four and a half minutes in which we saw the bright ring around the black silhouette of the moon,” Jay Pasachoff wrote in an email.

He added that it was the 73rd solar eclipse and the 19th annular one he had seen.

Sudbury, a town in Ontario north of Lake Huron, was not in the path of annularity, and the sun there was about 85% obscured. But that did not make the experience any less special.

“It was a really good show. For sure,” said Colin Durocher, a member of the local chapter of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

Getting to remote locations on the path of the full annular eclipse in Canada would have been challenging in normal times. COVID-19 restrictions made that even more difficult, and large groups were not advised to travel and gather in Ontario and Quebec.

In North Bay, Ontario, east of Sudbury, a local astronomy club heeded the COVID restrictions and kept their gathering along Lake Bernard small. They were rewarded with perfect weather.

“We’re still kind of flying a little bit high,” said club president Bill Montague. “Once we knew it was finished, we all stood up and we’re just high-fiving each other. It was awesome. It was great.”

Mike Reid, public outreach coordinator for the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, said there was a silver lining to such restrictions: The pandemic prompted the institute and colleagues at Discover the Universe, an astronomy training program based in Quebec, to ship 20,000 eclipse viewers to people in and around the eclipse’s path, including in Nunavut, a Canadian territory whose population is primarily Inuit.

“Because they are in quite remote locations, we wanted to make sure they would have the material to observe it,” said Julie Bolduc-Duval, executive director of Discover the Universe.

Reid added, “We’re in circumstances, in this pandemic, where everyone is forced to stay at home, but it actually helped bring everyone together on this one particular thing.” In Sudbury, Olathe MacIntyre, staff scientist at Space Place and the Planetarium at Science North, a museum there, was contributing to a livestream of the eclipse Thursday.

“It’s something we can share apart,” MacIntyre said.

Pat Smith had never seen a solar eclipse before. But he was in the ideal location for Thursday’s annular eclipse: Greenland.

Smith has worked there for 15 years for Polar Field Services, a company contracted by the National Science Foundation that helps scientists and others plan expeditions in remote parts of the Arctic. And that had him well-situated as the eclipse passed over Thule Air Base, the northernmost U.S. military base, which is about 700 miles inside the Arctic Circle.

He took in the sight on top of North Mountain, 1,000 feet up and about 7 1/2 miles from the base. His perch overlooked sea ice where three glaciers terminate into a fjord. And the weather, he said, was perfect, with clear skies and a warm temperature for the time of year. “There was one dramatic cloud I thought would cover the sun early on but it stayed just below and offered a nice perspective to the viewing,” he wrote in an email.

He said it felt very special to see the eclipse from a place such as Greenland.

“I was especially amazed when the moon centered itself on the sun,” he said, adding that “it was a perfect circle of darkness surrounded by the equally perfect ring of light from the sun.”

In Russia, the eclipse was visible in full only in Yakutia, a remote and sparsely populated region that is closer to Alaska than to Moscow and is known also as the Sakha Republic.

In Chokurdakh near the Arctic Ocean, Sakhayana Tomskaya and her family managed to enjoy the eclipse in its full glory.

“It’s white nights here in Chokurdakh, and we normally use two layers of curtains,” she said, referring to the time in June when the sun barely sets in areas at high latitudes. “But at the time of the full eclipse, it got completely dark in the house.”

She woke her children, who are 4 and 10 and had already gone to bed, to see the “ring of fire,” and she and her husband took pictures. They all made wishes. Farther south, in the small town of Zyryanka, along the Kolyma river, weather conditions were not on the stargazers’ side. Nina Ruchko, an attendant at a local dormitory, was looking forward to seeing the rare eclipse, but there was nothing but rain.

“It’s been pouring all day,” she said.

Rainy conditions also prevailed in Moscow, where the eclipse only covered about 15% of the sun and the city’s planetarium had organized a viewing.

No. Unless you are wearing special protective glasses, it is never a good idea to look directly at the sun, even if it is partly or annularly eclipsed.

Exposure to intense light from the sun during an eclipse can cause injuries to your retinas that may not heal. Such damage can lead to permanent vision loss, depending on how much exposure you experience.

To keep safe, wear eclipse glasses while viewing the eclipse. Not sunglasses — eclipse glasses, such as the ones you may have shoved in a drawer after 2017’s “Great American Eclipse.”

If you want to be more prepared the next time there is a solar eclipse in your vicinity, go to eclipse.aas.org/resources/solar-filters for a list of reputable vendors. And if you cannot get any glasses or other filtering viewers, there are other things you can do, including making a pinhole projector with cardboard or a paper plate. For instructions, go to nytimes.com/guides/science/how-to-watch-a-solar-eclipse.

Annular eclipses are not all that unusual. A “ring of fire” put on a show in the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia in December 2019.

One interesting feature about this eclipse is that it moved north, crossing over the North Pole before heading south. That the eclipse is occurring so far north is explained by its occurrence near the summer solstice, when the northern half of the planet is close to its most extreme tilt toward the sun.

The last time a crescent sunrise eclipse occurred in New York was 1875, Kentrianakis noted. “And they complained like us about getting up so early,” he said.

Solar eclipses happen every couple of years in some inconvenient part of the globe. But a couple are coming up that will be visible in parts of the Americas.

Another annular eclipse will occur Oct. 14, 2023. This one will start in the Pacific before crossing into the northwestern United States and working its way toward the Gulf of Mexico. It will cross the Yucatan Peninsula and some Central American countries before finishing up in Brazil.