The next total solar eclipse is 500 million miles away

This past week, there was a total solar eclipse, visible from a path stretching along far northern Russia, Greenland, Iceland, and Spain. Like many of this year’s eclipse chasers, I was clouded out – though I did have a lovely couple minutes of darkness on an Icelandic fjord. I’m already planning for the next time the Moon blocks the Sun: in the Mediterranean a bit less than a year from now. But most people don’t know there’s another total eclipse even sooner – and I can guarantee you there won’t be a cloud in the sky. My cloudy totality The Moon is about 400x smaller than the Sun, and also about 400x closer to Earth. That means it just barely blocks the Sun in Earth’s skies, revealing the Solar corona – the Sun’s ghostly outer atmosphere. The Moon’s distance to the Earth and the Earth’s distance to the Sun change slightly over the course of their orbits, so the apparent size of the Moon relative to the Sun (called the “magnitude” of the eclipse) ranges from a little under 0.91x to a…