Illustration courtesy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
During the Aug. 21, 2017, solar eclipse, the moon will move between the sun and the earth, blocking light from the sun and casting a shadow over North America. The two parts of this shadow are the umbra and the penumbra. The darkest part is the cone-shaped umbra. Where the tip of the cone meets the earth, that’s the path of the total eclipse. The penumbra—the lighter part of the shadow—is where a partial eclipse is visible. The illustration shown here is not to scale.
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