CAPE MAY – Cat Stevens sang about being followed by a moon shadow. We’ll be under one when a total solar eclipse occurs in North America on the afternoon of April 8. While we are not in the path of totality here, we will still see about 85 percent of the effects of the total solar eclipse.
The eclipse begins here at 2:08 p.m., reaching its maximum point at 3:23 p.m. Scientists are suggesting an interesting way to view the eclipse is to watch its effect on birds and wildlife.
A Zoom press event was held March 26 by SciLine, a philanthropically funded, editorially independent, free service for reporters based at the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Shannon Schmoll, director of the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University, said solar eclipses do not occur every month because the moon’s orbit around the Earth is tilted by about 5 degrees which causes the moon’s shadow to miss the Earth.
The darker inner part of the moon shadow is called the umbra and surrounding that is a lighter shadow called the penumbra.
“As the moon goes around in its orbit and the earth is rotating, the shadow of the moon being cast on the Earth will move across the Earth and so if you are within that path, the umbra, the dark part of the shadow, you will see a total solar eclipse,” Schmoll said. “Whereas, if you are in the path of the penumbra, the lighter part of the shadow, you will see a partial solar eclipse, so the moon will go in front of the sun, but it will never completely cover it like we have in the path of totality.”
The moon shadow will first reach land in Mazatlán, Mexico and go from Texas to Maine and end off the coast of Newfoundland, she said. The path for the total solar eclipse is about 100 miles wide with a duration of one minute to 4 minutes, 30 seconds depending on location, Schmoll said.
Permanent eye damage can result from looking directly at an eclipse, so eclipse glasses or some sort of indirect viewer must be used. Schmoll warned there are fraudulent eclipse glasses being sold. Proper eclipse glasses will bear the code: ISO 12312-2.
An indirect viewer will project an image of the sun onto the ground.
“Something with relatively small holes in it, if you hold it out, it will project an image of the sun onto the ground, so a Ritz cracker is good enough for this,” she said. “Go around your house, find things that have holes in it, a colander, a spoon, take a card and punch some holes in it.”
Even those not in the path of totality may feel the air temperature drop, Schmoll said. The next time a total solar eclipse will take place across a large portion of the United States will be in 2045. Andrew Farnsworth, a visiting scientist at the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said light is a very powerful stimulus for many animals.
“From the published accounts, we may start to see nocturnal behavior,” he said.
so for an example, nighttime behavior like crickets chirping, bats emerging to start those sorts of behaviors and stopping diurnal or daytime behavior, for example, birds going to roost or day-flying insects landing,” he said.
Farnsworth said he and his colleagues will be studying the impacts of the eclipse from a large-scale perspective using weather radar to track birds, insects and bats. He said a mosaic of 145 weather radar stations are available across the nation.
In a 2017 eclipse, scientists used eight radar stations that were in the path of totality and found a decline in the number of animals in flight but in a very different pattern than what occurs at sunset, Farnsworth said.
“In 2024, since the eclipse is occurring in April, it’s a very opportune time because large numbers of birds are migrating and they are strongly motivated to get to areas where they are going to be breeding, sort of rushing to get there,” he said.
Farnsworth said intensity and wavelength of light were very important for orientation and navigation and the ways that birds perceive their environment.
– By JACK FICHTER/Sentinel staff