A New York City-based astrophysicist joined “Mornings On 1” Monday to illuminate New Yorkers about what to expect during the solar eclipse.
Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, a scientist with the American Museum of Natural History, detailed the spectacle, noting it will be similar to the 2017 eclipse that swept over the five boroughs.
“If you can see the horizon, you see a shadow sweeping across the ground towards you. And within a few moments, you're inside the shadow and suddenly it's getting darker and darker; and it quickly becomes almost nightlight,” he said. “There's a little bit of dawn around the horizon. You look up in the sky, there's no more bright sun. Instead, there's this blue glowing ring, which is the superheated gas of the solar corona surrounding the sun.”
Mac Low said that New York City residents will not experience a total eclipse like those in parts of upstate New York, but there will be visible changes with about 90% of the sun coverage.
“You'll notice that the sun seems a little bit weak. It would be like seeing it through like a thin layer of clouds. Everything will get a little bit dimmer, but it will be nothing like the totality because the sun is extremely bright,” Mac Low said.
He said the eclipse should last only a few minutes, and it will have no lasting impacts.
“When it's gone, it's gone. A shadow swept over you,” he said. “In the upper atmosphere of the Earth, there'll be some readjustment because everything holding the ionosphere ionized suddenly went away and just as suddenly came back. But if you're not running a communication satellite, you probably won't notice that.”