Millions more could potentially watch in real time as the eclipse is captured by video cameras mounted on 50 high-altitude balloons and streamed online in a joint project between NASA and Montana State University. Many are attending multiday festivals featuring music, yoga and astronomy lectures. Some 200 million Americans reside within a day's drive of the totality zone, and as many as 7 million, experts say, are expected to converge on towns and campgrounds along the narrow corridor for the event. The 12 million people who live there can view the eclipse at its fullest merely by walking outside and looking up, weather permitting. On Monday, the deepest part of the shadow, or umbra, cast by the moon will fall over a 70-mile-wide (113-km-wide), 2,500-mile-long (4,000-km-long) "path of totality" traversing 14 states. National Geographic estimated 30 million people in Shanghai and Hangzhou alone were in its path that day. Some might take issue with that prediction, citing a solar eclipse visible over parts of India, Nepal, Bangladesh and central China in July 2009. experts predict will be unprecedented viewership for the so-called "Great American Eclipse." The largest is Nashville, Tennessee, a city of 660,000 residents.Įven so the advent of social media and inexpensive high-tech optics have boosted public awareness, assuring what many U.S. In terms of audience potential, it is hard to top the United States, with its mobile and affluent population, even though the direct path is mostly over rural areas, towns and small cities. The total eclipse of the sun is considered one of the most spell-binding phenomena in nature but it rarely occurs over a wide swath of land, let alone one of the world's most heavily populated countries at the height of summer. It will reach South Carolina's Atlantic shore some 90 minutes later. The eclipse begins its cross-country trajectory over the Pacific Coast of Oregon in late morning. "It will certainly be the most observed total eclipse in history," astronomer Rick Fienberg of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) said last week.
When those watching via broadcast and online media are factored into the mix, the spectacle will likely smash records. The sight of the moon's shadow passing directly in front of the sun, blotting out all but the halo-like solar corona, may draw the largest live audience for a celestial event in human history.
(Reuters) - Twilight will fall at midday on Monday, stars will glimmer and birds will roost in an eerie stillness as millions of Americans and visitors witness the first total solar eclipse to traverse the United States from coast to coast in 99 years.
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