Last seen in 1979, the 2017 total solar eclipse is all set to woo sky gazers in August – All you need to know!

Image courtesy: Wikipedia

New Delhi: Some time in the year 2014, American space agency NASA had confirmed the occurrance of a total solar eclipse in 2017.

Now that the new year is merely a couple of days away, we believe it is a good time to issue a reminder of one of the rarest celestial events that will take place on August 21, 2017.

This August, many Americans will be able to witness the phenomenon right from their porches. The Great American Total Solar Eclipse will be visible in several states, including Kentucky, Missouri, and Illinois.

This solar eclipse will be the first one ever since the year 1979, which means it is taking place after 99 years! Total solar eclipses that can be easily seen by humans are quite rare.

Although, according to Earthsky.org, the path of the moon’s umbral shadow starts in the northern Pacific and moves east through parts of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina; NASA released a video depicting the path that the eclipse will take.

NASA said that, when depicting an eclipse path, data visualizers have usually chosen to represent the moon’s shadow as an oval … For the first time, we are able to see that the moon’s shadow is better represented as a polygon. This more complicated shape is based NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s view of the mountains and valleys that form the moon’s jagged edge. By combining moon’s terrain, heights of land forms on Earth, and the angle of the sun, (the video) is able to show the eclipse path with the greatest accuracy to date.

Check out the video below:

(Video courtesy: NASA Goddard)