← Another date

Birthday · March 3, 2024

A Total Solar Eclipse Close-Up in Real Time

March 3, 2024

The oldest light in the universe still hums faintly through space, a relic of the beginning itself.

A Total Solar Eclipse Close-Up in Real Time

A little universe, just for you

Your date.
Ready to give.

Free PNG · 1080 × 1350 · No account needed

Image rights and credit requirements apply when sharing or reusing imagery.

Change the year

APOD published March 3, 2024 · Video still. Credit: Jun Ho Oh (KAIST, HuboLab); Music: Flowing Air by Mattia Vlad Morleo. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.

Behind the image

A Total Solar Eclipse Close-Up in Real Time

Original APOD · March 3, 2024

How would you feel if the Sun disappeared? Many eclipse watchers across the USA surprised themselves in 2017 with the awe that they felt and the exclamations that they made as the Sun momentarily disappeared behind the Moon. Perhaps expecting just a brief moment of dusk, the spectacle of unusually rapid darkness, breathtakingly bright glowing beads around the Moon's edge, shockingly pink solar prominences, and a strangely detailed corona stretching across the sky caught many a curmudgeon by surprise. Many of these attributes were captured in the featured real-time, three-minute video of 2017's total solar eclipse. The video frames were acquired in Warm Springs, Oregon with equipment specifically designed by Jun Ho Oh to track a close-up of the Sun's periphery during eclipse. As the video ends, the Sun is seen being reborn on the other side of the Moon from where it departed. Next month, on April 8th, a new total solar eclipse will be visible in a thin band across North America.

Image credit: Jun Ho Oh (KAIST, HuboLab); Music: Flowing Air by Mattia Vlad Morleo

Watch the original video
Explore March 3 in other years