Moon will obscure sun in partial solar eclipse

LOS ANGELES -- A dazzling solar eclipse will be on display across a broad swath of the western United States, Mexico, Canada and Asia on Monday, with as much as 99 percent of the sun obscured by the moon.

One of the best U.S. views will be in San Diego, where as much as three-fourths of the sun will be hidden.

Other sections of the country will get a less dramatic sight. In Chicago, only one-fifth of the sun's surface will be blocked. The Eastern Seaboard will miss the eclipse entirely.

The late afternoon event is called an annular, or ring-shaped, eclipse. Because the moon will be closer to the Earth than during total eclipses, it will only partially cover the distant sun.

In places such as the tip of Mexico's Baja California peninsula, the moon will darken all but only the glowing rim of the sun for about a minute, said Fred Espenak, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration astrophysicist and eclipse expert.

The moon's shadow will follow an 8,700-mile path, racing eastward from Asia across the Pacific Ocean at 1,000 mph.

Because it's a partial eclipse, the sun's light will be only dimmed.

"It's like a light cloud passing in front of the sun," said John Mosley, an astronomer at the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles.

Even though it's a partial eclipse, Mosley warned against looking directly at the sun. Instead, he recommended peering through commercially available solar filters, which block all but a fraction of the sun's light. Viewers also can use binoculars, not to look through, but to project the sun's image on an index card.