On Tuesday, October 25, there will be a partial solar eclipse that can be seen from all over Poland, provided the weather will be good. In the case of Warsaw, it will start at 11:14 a.m. It will be the deepest eclipse visible in our country in the last 7 years.
In the case of Warsaw, the eclipse will start at 11:14 a.m., will reach the maximum phase at 12:23 p.m. and end at 01:33 p.m. The maximum phase will be at 12:56 p.m. In other regions of our country, the exact moments of each stage of the eclipse may differ up to several minutes compared to those indicated for Warsaw.
Overall, the eclipse will be visible across Europe, with the exception of the southwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula. It will also be seen in Northeast Africa, Northwest Asia, and the North Indian Ocean.
Various astronomical organizations and institutions are preparing eclipse displays. For example, the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw invites you to joint observations at Al. Ujazdowskie 4 in Warsaw.
The shows are also prepared in Toruń: Center for Modernity Mill of Knowledge invites you to the car park in front of its main building.
The Astronomical Observatory Institute of the Adam Mickiewicz University and members of the Astronomical Science Club encourage you to come to the observations that will be carried out from the park at the observatory building at ul. Słoneczna 36 in Poznań.
In the south of Poland, there will be an opportunity to observe from the Youth Astronomical Observatory in Niepołomice. The shows will also be organized in other places.
You will also be able to watch broadcasts on Youtube, incl. from the Youth Astronomical Observatory in Niepołomice, Hevelianum, Astronomical Observatory in Truszczyny and other institutions, organizations and individuals.
Nothing prevents you from observing the eclipse yourself from anywhere in Poland. At the same time, the warning that you must not look at the sun through telescopes or binoculars unless they are equipped with the proper filters should be taken seriously. This can lead to damage or even blindness.
If we have an ordinary telescope at our disposal, and not an instrument built specifically for observing the Sun, then the safest way to observe an eclipse is to project the image of the Sun from the telescope onto the screen. The screen can be a wall or a blank sheet of paper. Then we look at the projected image, not at the eyepiece of the telescope.
You can also see the eclipse without a telescope, you just have to weaken the sun’s glare. There are, for example, special glasses for observing solar eclipses on the market, you can also use mylar foil (available for purchase online or in shops with optical devices). There are also “home” methods such as welding glass, a heavily smoky glass, X-rays or a CD, although they also require caution – let’s not exaggerate the length of looking at the Sun through such “devices” (look for a moment, and then break).
What causes solar eclipses? They can occur when the Moon is between the Earth and the Sun and completely or partially obscures the sun’s disc. In this configuration, the Moon is in the new moon, but there is not an eclipse at every new moon, because the orbit of the natural satellite of the Earth is not perfectly circular, and in addition it has a slightly slope relative to the plane of our planet’s orbit.
There are several types of eclipses: partial, total and annular. Total eclipses are the most spectacular, but unfortunately they are visible only in a fairly narrow belt, and further from it we can only see a partial eclipse. For a given point on Earth, total eclipses are very rare. In Poland, the last total eclipse was visible in 1954 (Suwałki, Sejny), and the next one will be in 2135.
When the lunar disk does not cover the entire solar disk, it is a partial eclipse. We can observe this type of eclipse more often from a given place. For example, the previous partial eclipse was visible from Poland on June 10, 2021.
In turn, in an annular eclipse, the entire Moon obscures the Sun, but the situation occurs when the Silver Globe is too far from our planet and the angular size of its disk visible in the sky is smaller than the angular size of the Sun’s disk. A bright ring is then visible around the moon’s dark disc.
People were able to predict the times of solar eclipses already in antiquity. Nowadays, total eclipses are a great tourist attraction and gather a lot of people who come to the belt of a total eclipse even from distant corners of the world to see this phenomenon.