Caoimhín's Content

Today, we are yet again heading far into the future to take a look at an event that won’t be occurring for hundreds of years. We are looking all the way forward to 2186 and we’re going to be looking for the 16th of July. Starting as normal, from Ireland and during the day, it is immediately noticeable that the Moon, the New Moon, is very close to the Sun in the sky. It’s not close enough to make an eclipse, at least not from here in Ireland. However, for this video, as with many videos where we take a look into the future, I haven’t been told exactly what I’m looking for but I have been told where look from, and it’s not Ireland.

Either way we are going to have a quick look at the sky from here in Ireland. Just after sunset we can see some of the planets, with Venus, Saturn and Jupiter in the sky. I was told to take a look at this date from the north of South America, northern South America, around Colombia, Venezuela, that kind of area. Moving through the night is pretty uneventful, with Mars visible in the morning. Still staying in Ireland, I’ll very quickly get rid of the atmosphere just in case there’s anything hiding in the sky. It doesn’t look like there are any planetary occultations or anything like that, but it does look like the Moon is very close to being in front of the Sun. We certainly don’t seem to be seeing anything in particular from Ireland, but that’s okay, that’s not where we were told to look from. We’re going to shift our view over to northern South America and we’re going to take a look at the exact same date. We’re looking nice and early in the morning, just 9:30 in the morning in the year 2186 on the 16th of July, and we are getting an eclipse. Now this does look like it should be a total solar eclipse, but it seems pretty brief from this location. We’ll need to move through time slowly to catch perfect totality or at least nearly perfect totality.

We do get an eclipse obscuration of 100%, so we are getting a perfect total eclipse at just 9:33 on the 16th of the 7th, 2186. We’re looking from 4 degrees north and 68 degrees west, which is negative 68 degrees or West 68 degrees. We’re just off of the equator and we’re getting an absolutely perfect total eclipse. It doesn’t seem to be lasting very long, but it is dark enough that we can see Mercury and Venus during the day. I’m a little bit surprised, actually, that we can’t see Mars, but Mars is a little bit fainter. This is a perfect total eclipse, and it looks like we’re very nearly in the perfect place to see it as well. However, it does seem a little bit brief, I feel like this eclipse would last a little bit longer if we were a tiny bit further to the west. So we’ll hop just a little bit further west, just a tiny bit, just in case the eclipse is a little bit better. Of course, 100% eclipsed is 100% eclipsed, all of the Sun is behind the Moon, but how long this lasts does vary from place to place. If we focus on the Moon, I feel like the Moon must be pretty close to us, and indeed it is. If we come back to the moment of absolute totality, we can see the Moon is just 352,000km away. The Moon is pretty much at its closest to the Earth here and when the Moon is at its closest to the Earth, it’s going to seem a little bit bigger. This is the opposite of an annular eclipse. If the Moon was at its furthest from us, we’d be able to see a little bit of the Sun around the Moon, in a ring or annulus. Here, the Moon is at its closest to us, so it’s covering up the Sun and then some, covering a little bit more than the average eclipse with the Moon at the average distance.

During the totality, we can really clearly see the corona of the Sun, and with the peak of the eclipse it is dark enough to see planets during the day. We have shifted location a little, we’ve gone a little bit closer to the equator, so we’re at 3 degrees north, and we’ve gone a little bit further west, 73 degrees west or minus 73 degrees. If we go back to the Sun, we can see the width of the umbra being indicated, at 246 km. That means there is a dark circle on the Earth 246 kilometers across, a dark circle covering this portion of Northern South America, just next to the waist with Central America. As this umbra seems so large, we are going to go to the Moon and look back on the Earth to actually see that shadow.

Travelling to the Moon puts us in roughly the same location transposed onto the Moon. We’ll come a little bit closer to the middle on the Moon because we want to be facing the Earth and this is the side of the Moon that faces the Earth. Looking straight up at the zenith, we can see the very bright shape of the Earth. We’re almost having an alignment between the Earth and Jupiter from the Moon’s perspective, which is interesting, but not what we’re looking for. We’re looking at the Earth to see the dark spot, the umbra of the eclipse. Just down towards the edge of the disc that we are seeing of the globe, there is dark spot which is the shadow of the Moon. As we move through time, that shadow passes across the Earth. It moves across from the Pacific at sunrise and then off into the Atlantic towards sunset, just cutting across that northern tip of South America. The path of the shadow kind of curves down across the Atlantic, so there is a chance that at least a small part of Africa will see a partial eclipse, but not very much.

This the eclipse of course is coming up in over 100 years, in the year 2186. We’ll take a quick look at it from the perspective of the Sun as well while we’re here, but this eclipse, it is not coming up for a while but it does seem like this eclipse is a particularly good one. Of course, we are going to have plenty of eclipses between now and then as well. We’ll go to the Sun in roughly in the same relative location around the equator, and we should be facing roughly the right way. We can see the Earth with the Moon in the way, blocking part of the Earth. The Moon appears to be in front of that portion of South America where we would expect the eclipse to be at its maximum totality. I have discussed solar eclipses from other perspectives before, so this is another total solar eclipse as seen from the Moon and the Earth. Moving through time, we can see the Moon passing across, blocking out the Sun’s light and we can see the Moon does seem to be touching off a little bit of Africa as well.

We’ll hop back to the Earth and we’ll come down to the Atlantic coast of Africa. I think there might have some amount of a partial eclipse just as the Sun is setting. We’re getting a smaller partial eclipse still, even from this far away from the best location. It looks like we would need to be out in the Atlantic ocean for this eclipse to reach totality, to be in the path of totality for this eclipse. We’ll go a little bit west of the coast, but this is definitely getting into the realm of the ocean. It looks like outside of South America, outside of that northern part of South America, Venezuela, Colombia, that kind of region, it looks like this eclipse is really only going to be visible passing over the ocean. However, from the ocean we get another perfect totality of the eclipse. We’re at -9 degrees latitude, so we’re down in the southern hemisphere, 9 degrees south and -5 degrees longitude, so we’re just off the meridian to the west. This does give us a totality of the eclipse, but you would have to be on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic, which, of course, is something that people have done to watch eclipses in the past, to get boats out into the ocean where the eclipse is at its best. This eclipse in particular, it is going to be visible from land as well, so you’ll have a slightly better chance to see it if you are in northern South America in the year 2186.

I hope you enjoyed seeing the eclipse here, just in case you don’t get to see see it in real life. If you did enjoy this piece, then please do like it. If you like this kind of content, then please subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel. Thank you very much for watching, and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.