Eclipses and meteor showers

Pick a place at the top — a City, typed Lat / lon with a time zone, or Here (the browser asks first). The place is shared with planet events in this browser. Times are in the place’s own time zone.

How to use it

Solar eclipses lists the 68 solar eclipses of 2020–2050 and what each looks like from your place: total, annular, partial (with the fraction of the sun’s diameter and of its disc covered) or not seen. Tap one for the details:

Local circumstances — first contact (C1), the start and end of totality or annularity (C2, C3), maximum and last contact (C4), each with the sun’s altitude and bearing, the magnitude (the fraction of the sun’s diameter covered), the obscuration (the fraction of its area) and the length of totality. Outside the path it says roughly how far away the path is.
A picture of the sun and moon at maximum, as you’d see it (north up, east left).
A world map: the shaded area sees a partial eclipse while the sun is up (darker bands every 0.2 of magnitude), the dark band is the path of totality (gold for annularity), × is greatest eclipse. Drag the slider to move the moon’s penumbra (dashed blue) and the centre of its shadow across the map through the eclipse.

Lunar eclipses lists the 71 lunar eclipses of 2020–2050 (penumbral ones hidden by default — they are hard to notice). For one eclipse you get the contact times (P1, U1, U2, greatest, U3, U4, P4) in your time zone with the moon’s altitude at each, whether you see all of it, part of it (the moon rises or sets during it) or none, the magnitudes and durations, and a drawing of the moon’s path through the Earth’s shadow.

Meteor showers is for one night (tonight by default). It lists the showers active that night with their ZHR, the rate one observer at your place can expect at best and when, and a graph of the expected hourly rate from dusk to dawn over bands of twilight, with the moon’s height. Pick your sky — from a dark site (naked-eye limiting magnitude 6.5) to a city centre (3.0). Below is the whole year’s list with each peak date, the moon’s phase at the peak and how high the radiant gets in the dark from your place; tap a shower to jump to its peak night.

The rate is the IMO’s relation turned round: HR = ZHR × sin(h) ÷ r^(6.5 − LM)^, where h is the radiant’s altitude, r the shower’s population index and LM the limiting magnitude. Moonlight raises the sky brightness (Krisciunas and Schaefer’s 1991 model, at the zenith), and the limiting magnitude drops by 1.25 × log₁₀ of the ratio of moonlit to dark sky; a full moon high up costs a dark site about 1.5–2 magnitudes, which cuts a Perseid rate to a third or less. The shower’s activity is modelled as ZHR_max_ × 10^(−B |λ☉ − λ_max_|)^ between its start and end dates, with the slopes B from Jenniskens (1994) for the major showers. These are expectations for an average year; outbursts aren’t predicted.

For the sun’s and moon’s times on the day see sun and moon; for photographing an eclipse or a meteor shower, night-sky photography; for what a telescope will show, optics.

Never look at the partly eclipsed sun without a certified solar filter (ISO 12312-2); only during totality is it safe to look directly.

How it is calculated

Solar eclipses use NASA’s polynomial Besselian elements for each eclipse, and the local circumstances are found by the method of the Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac (iterating for the time of maximum and each contact), with the observer on the WGS-84 ellipsoid at sea level. The path of totality is the edge of the umbra across the shadow’s motion, and the map shading evaluates every 1.5° of latitude and longitude. Lunar eclipse times are NASA’s (greatest eclipse ± half the duration of each phase); the moon’s altitude and the shadow drawing use the site’s shared astronomy core (Meeus’s lunar theory and VSOP87 for the sun).

Checked against NASA’s published circumstances: the total eclipse of 8 April 2024 in Dallas (totality 13:40:37–13:44:26 CDT here; NASA 13:40:43–13:44:34), the eclipse of 12 August 2026 in Spain (Zaragoza and A Coruña total for about 1¼ minutes with the sun 6–12° up, Madrid a 99.9 % partial just outside the path), the annular eclipse of 14 October 2023 in San Antonio, the path width at greatest eclipse in 2024 (199 km; NASA 198 km), and the total lunar eclipse of 14 March 2025 (totality 06:26–07:31 UT).

Limits

Solar contact times are good to a few seconds. NASA’s elements use a predicted ΔT (the difference between Earth’s rotation and atomic time; 74 s for 2024 when the real value was 69 s), which moves the path east or west by a kilometre or two, and the moon’s mountains and valleys move the edges of the path and the contact times by a second or two — near the edge of the path, check a detailed map such as Xavier Jubier’s.
Heights above sea level and the local horizon (hills, buildings) are not included.
Meteor radiant positions are those at maximum, moved by an approximate daily drift for the long showers. Rates assume a clear sky with the whole sky in view; real counts vary a lot.

Privacy

Everything is computed in your browser. The eclipse tables and the map outline load from this site; nothing about you is sent anywhere. Your location (if you choose Here) and your settings stay in this browser’s local storage.

Data and credits

Eclipse predictions by Fred Espenak, NASA’s GSFC — Besselian elements from the Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses and times from the Five Millennium Catalog of Lunar Eclipses (Espenak and Meeus), reproduced with NASA’s acknowledgement as they ask.
Land outlines: Natural Earth 1:110m, public domain.
Meteor showers: the International Meteor Organization’s working list of visual meteor showers (IMO Meteor Shower Calendar); profile slopes from
1. Jenniskens, Astronomy and Astrophysics 287, 990 (1994).
Moonlit sky: K. Krisciunas and B. E. Schaefer, PASP 103, 1033 (1991).