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Crescent Sunset
nick_davison writes "According to those ever helpful folks at NASA, next Monday's (10th) sunset should be a "crescent". Depending on where you live, as much as 80% of the sun should be obscured by the moon, leaving just a glowing cresent shape. If you are lucky enough to be in the middle of the Pacific ocean at the time, the moon will pass dead-center. Though too small to cause a full eclipse, the annular eclipse should create a "ring of fire" as the sun shines around it."
I thought I was going to have a chance to show the little one a (partial) eclipse but apparently the east coast won't see any action. "Only west of Atlanta" it says.
The best eclipse map I've seen is in this May 20th article at space.com.
Taiwan, the Philippines, and New Guinea will see the eclipse at sunrise on June 11. This Sky and Telescope article has another map.
Here's why
Nope, they're right. You're thinking of the energy per photon, which is relevant if you're worried about getting cancer from it, but irrelevant here, since the danger is from heating.
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Be very careful if you ever do this. The retina in your eye doesn't have proper nerve endings, so it's quite possible for your eye to be wasting away without it immediately hurting. You may not notice all the damage until much too late.
The story says that in the middle of the pacific, the sun is a ring of fire. I just wanted to point out that such eclipses are about as common as total solar eclipses, and they are called annular eclipses. Since the angular size of the sun varies over a period of a year, it causes about half of 'dead on' eclipses to be annular eclipses instead of total eclipses.