What you need to know about the solar eclipse on April 8

Several locations throughout Windsor and Essex County fall into the path of totality for the upcoming solar eclipse on April 8.

CTV News science and technology specialist Dan Riskin talks about what you need to know about the eclipse:

Q: What is an eclipse?

Riskin: An eclipse is a thing that happens actually pretty frequently - about every 18 months on average, there's some spot on our planet where the moon passes between our planet in the sun so that there's an eclipse where it looks like the sun partly disappears. What's rare about this is that if you pick any spot on earth like your house, it's very rare for one to happen. There and on average, it takes about 366 years for Eclipse is to return to the same place. It's different for different places, but this is a rare event. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see a celestial event that is going to take your breath away.

Q: How can people watch safely?

Riskin: There's a lot of talk about the danger of looking at the sun during an eclipse. It is dangerous, but it's no more dangerous than it is anytime to look at the sun. So you don't need to worry that people are in increased danger or there's more radiation or anything like that. It's just that normally people would have no reason to stare at the sun and during an eclipse. There's this motivation that causes a lot of people to do something they shouldn't do. You can hurt your retinas and you can cause damage that's going to make it hard to see for days. Or even months, potentially even permanently if you look right at it. So what you need to do is get a pair of these you need to get some eclipse glasses. They're cheap. They're available online. You just don't want to wait to the last minute when everybody else has bought them out. And you just put them over your eyes and you won't be able to see anything except if you look at the sun, and the sun then will appear as a circle. And then that circle is going to change to a sort of a PacMan I guess that crescent shape, and then eventually it's going to be completely covered and it's going to be exciting. Now if you're in the path of totality. It's okay to look at the sun with your bare eyes. During totality for those three and a half minutes that the sun is totally covered by the moon. That's fine. But once that sun peaks around from the back again, you can't be looking with your bare eyes because you can damage your retinas.Dan Riskin is CTV News' Science and Technology Specialist. (Soure: CTV News Windsor)

Q: Some people will want to film it with their phones probably because that's what they have.Is it safe to sit there and record it with their cell phone or what's the best way to kind of record it?

Riskin: It's fine to record with your cell phone. To be honest, you're gonna find better views other people took, so it's I think it's more exciting to take pictures of the people around you that you're sharing this moment with or the landscape than to try to get an astronomical picture. There are going to be people with special telescopes getting special images. If you do have a telescope or binoculars it's really important not to point those at the Sun unless they're specially built for it because if you think about what a magnifying glass and the sun does to an ant, just imagine what binoculars and the sun will do to the back of your eyeball. You really can do serious damage. So please don't be looking at the sun with binoculars or a telescope. Just try to take it in. It's fine to take a picture with your phone. It's not going to hurt it but the pictures just aren't going to be very good.

Q: Why is there so much public interest on social media in eclipses?

Riskin: Well, this eclipse is a is a really big deal. I mean, there isn't going to be another solar eclipse in Canada and for another 20 years and that one's going to be out in Alberta. And so this is really something that doesn't happen very often. And the fact that it's a total eclipse is really a stunner. I mean, we're talking dark outside we're talking about you'll be able to see the stars in the sky in the middle of the day. And that is just something that doesn't happen very often. There are references to eclipse in Shakespeare, there are references to eclipse in in scientific texts going back for centuries, and scientists pour over those texts to use those Eclipse descriptions to try to pick down exactly what yours different things are happening. I mean, these are sort of momentous occasions on the timescale of humanity. The other thing that makes it so special is if you'd grown up on any other planet, this would not happen because the fact that our moon happens to look like it's exactly the same size as the sun even though the sun is 400 times wider, but the moon is 400 times closer, and they just line up exactly right. That's just a total fluke. And so if you grew up on Mars, or on some bait of century whatever on some other galaxy, you wouldn't have an eclipse like this. This is Earth special. And so the fact that this is coming right to your house, it's really an alignment of the momentum alignment of the planets, but an alignment of this one star and a moon certainly, and you should take it in it's really a momentous magical event.

Q: So basically what you're saying for the people that aren't looking at the sun or the sky, even if they're just looking on the ground, it'll just be like it's 9 p.m. and it'll be just dark?

Riskin: It'll be like it's midnight. It's going to be unreal. So the birds Kotori making noises and all this stuff. Then all of a sudden this over the course of about two minutes right where totality starts to happen. It's going to suddenly start to get really dark the lighting is going to seem very strange because your cones and your retinas are going to be having an argument over what's really happening. And so your brain is going to interpret some of the colors wrong. It's going to be a really wacky couple of minutes and then it's going to be so dark that that bird stop chirping. The crickets start making noise and you can see Jupiter and Venus in the sky along with all the stars. And then it's going to go back to daytime. I mean, what a weird thing to have happened. And honestly, can you imagine if you grew up in early times where they did not have a website that told you when the Eclipse was going to happen, and this just happened one day that's what for me, that's what I'm going to be thinking the whole time is Wouldn't this be weird if I didn't know what was going on?

Q: What's the difference going to be for the parts of Windsor-Essex that are not in the path of totality?

Riskin: It will be very similar to as if it was complete, totally flips if you find yourself in Windsor, and you're not able to get to the path of totality along with zillion other people that are trying to get down there. You haven't been ripped off totally, you're going to have a great event. So in the path of totality, the sun is 100% covered in Windsor. It's 99.46% coverage. So you're pretty good. It's basically you're just going to see it's you're going to look like a total eclipse but there's still going to just be this very, very, very bright edge at the side of it. It's still going to be dark.