Upcoming Solar Eclipses

It's been almost a full month since the Great American Solar Eclipse of 2017.  I saw this total eclipse in person!  Jealous?  You should be!  LOL!  Solar eclipses take place every couple of years, but you have to be in a very specific place on Earth to see totality.  So when and where are upcoming solar eclipses?  The image below shows future (and a few past) eclipses for the next two decades.

The next total solar eclipse is in about two years, in 2019.  Much of the path of totality cuts across oceans, but there is a stretch through southern South America.  The next total solar eclipse to cut across the U.S. is April 8, 2024.  I'm excited about this one as totality will last nearly 4 minutes and I currently live in the path of totality.  No traveling required for this one!  Unfortunately April is not a great month for clear skies for much of the U.S.  There's a much greater chance of cloudy skies in April than in August (this past eclipse).  There are, of course, sunny days in April, so fingers crossed.

Looking at the U.S. further into the future, we see the following map of eclipses.

The blue paths are total eclipses while the yellow paths are annular eclipses.  An annular eclipses takes place when the Moon moves in front of the Sun, but at a time when the Moon is a bit farther from the Earth.  Thus the Moon may move across the middle of the Sun, it isn't big enough to block the full disk of the sun.  

For total eclipses, there's another good eclipse coming in 2045 that will sweep from the west coast to the east coast.  It's also a bit wider with an even longer total eclipse length.  So there are still opportunities out there for you to view a total solar eclipse if you happened to miss the one in August 2017.