Four years today there will a spectacular solar eclipse in Western Australia

More fool them because in WA the hybrid solar eclipse will effectively be a total solar eclipse. It’s actually very simple.

“A hybrid eclipse is one which is annular when the path first touches the Earth, and/or leaves the Earth, but which becomes total for a period in-between,” said Australian astronomer Dave Herald. So depending on where you stand in the eclipse track on the surface of Earth, it can appear as a total solar eclipse or as an annular solar eclipse. Luckily, during that ‘in-between’ period is exactly when the moon’s shadow hits part of Western Australia, Timor Leste and West Papua. However, the spectacle begins and ends as an annular solar eclipse, in this case, at sea.

This means that, hybrid or not, every eclipse-chaser who goes to watch this eclipse on land, or anywhere near it, will experience totality just the same as at any other total solar eclipse. So there you have it; you have no excuse to miss this one!

However, it’s important to get as close as possible to the center of the Path of Totality; straying even a few miles either side means drastically cutting-down on maximum duration. The lure in 2023, of course, is 1 minute 16 seconds of totality. That may not sound like much, but it will be enough to attract tens of thousands of eclipse-chasers.

Although totality will also be observable from Timor Leste and West Papua, most eclipse-chasers will head to Exmouth in Western Australia, or to a cruise ship off the coast on the Ningaloo Reef. Tourist season there is March to November when the population leaps from 2,700 to 7,500. So that’s about 5,000 beds, though there will be lots of camping opportunities in the peninsula’s Cape Range National Park.

Can Exmouth handle the influx of eclipse-chasers? “Exmouth is a fairly remote location,” says Herald. “The biggest hurdle will be getting there, particularly if the airlines don’t put on extra flights.” From Perth, it’s a 1,270 km drive on a sealed road.

Image credit: Eclipse map/figure/table/predictions courtesy of Fred Espenak, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. Map data © Google 2017

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