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With an eclipse of the sun occurring at least twice per year, why have so very few people seen a total solar eclipse? Well, for starters, most solar eclipses are not total, they are only partial, and many more people have seen a partial eclipse of the sun than have seen a total eclipse. There is another point that is perhaps the most important reason. A total eclipse of the sun is visible only within a narrow path on the earth that is 15 to 150 miles wide, whereas a partial eclipse is visible anywhere in a band more than 2000 miles wide. If you are not in that narrow strip of totality, you will not see a total eclipse. When the fact of a narrow strip is combined with the fact that the earth’s surface is 70% water, then most of the path of a total eclipse is over an ocean. Therefore, entire continents can go decades without a total solar eclipse. In fact, North America has gone since 1979 without one, and will not get another one until 2017. That means that hundreds of millions of Americans have never experienced one. Another factor is that the narrow path of totality can be anywhere on the earth, and that truly means anywhere! It can be in the Gobi desert (2008), Antarctica, in the southern Pacific not touching any continent, northern Greenland in winter, etc. Therefore they are not generally easy to get to … in fact they are almost always not. The rule of chasing total solar eclipses is that you have to go to them, they will not come to you. If you stand on a spot on the earth (such as your front yard) and wait for a total solar eclipse to come to you, you will wait (on the average) 700 years. Thus a contributing reason for people not seeing a total eclipse of the sun is that they do not chase them; most people wait for an eclipse to come to them. The final factor in having so few people who have actually experienced this phenomemom is the weather. If it is raining, or even just cloudy, you will not see it. A classic example is the July, 2009 eclipse over southern China. The path of totality went directly over Shanghai, where tens of millions would have seen their first total eclipse, but it was cloudy and raining at that exact time. Only small numbers actually saw part of it about 30 miles from Shanghai.
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