Totality reached Mazatlán, Mexico, at 11.07pm PT, and will last for four minutes and 17 seconds. It’s the first populated community anywhere in North America to experience totality during today’s total solar eclipse.
A reminder that you can enter your zip code on Nasa’s eclipse explorer to find out what you can expect to see where you are, and how long you can expect to see it.
First totality in the US will take place in Texas at 1.30pm CT. Many areas of the US are already experiencing a partial eclipse.
Bill Nelson, the former astronaut and US senator who’s now the head of Nasa, has just been on the space agency’s livestream of today’s eclipse explaining why it’s such a big deal:
You have the alignment of three celestial bodies, and unique things happen when that occurs. It has a profound effect here on Earth, the middle of the day and all of a sudden it gets totally dark.
Us earthlings are not accustomed to that, and the little earthlings, all the animals. But it’s also an opportunity for us to study much more. One of those celestial bodies, that’s our star, the sun, we can find out more about that gaseous explosion that’s coming out from the core of the sun.
We can see it better because we’re not looking at the bright ball. You’re suddenly looking at that corona that mass of gasses that are coming out from the edge of the sun.
