Eva Deschamps / June 8, 2021
A solar eclipse will cross the sky of the northern hemisphere on Thursday, on a strip of about 500 km from Canada to Siberia, through Europe, where it will be only partial but still dangerous for the eyes.
At the peak of this so-called annular eclipse, Earthlings will see the Moon slowly slip in front of the Sun, transforming it for a few minutes into a thin ring of light, like a ring of fire in the June sky.
A spectacle reserved for the few inhabitants of the highest latitudes, which are right in the axis: Northwestern Canada, extreme north of Russia, Northwestern Greenland and the North Pole, where the occultation of the solar disk will be 87.8%, says the Observatoire de Paris-PSL. The annular eclipse will also be visible, but only partially, in northwestern North America, a large part of Europe, including France and Great Britain, and part of northern Asia.
This is the first annular eclipse of the year 2021, and the sixteenth of the twenty-first century. This astronomical phenomenon occurs in period of new Moon, when Earth, Moon and Sun are perfectly aligned. If the apparent diameter of the Moon is smaller than that of the Sun, part of the ring of fire remains visible. A total eclipse, which briefly plunges a part of the planet into darkness, occurs when the diameter of the Moon corresponds exactly to that of the Sun, seen from the Earth.