Weekly digest
Pick the categories you care about: movies, AI launches, sports, eclipses, and major public dates. One email per week, and never anything you did not ask for.
Want full preferences? Customize your digest →
Deep partial solar eclipse — up to 87% obscuration in the central US, Mexico, and the Caribbean. No path of totality.
A purely partial solar eclipse — Saros 117 is now past its central phase, so this and the remaining members produce only partial events. The umbral shadow passes north of Earth, leaving North America under a deep partial.
Time to greatest eclipse
Peak in your local time: 2029-01-14T17:13:48Z
Peak UTC
17:13:48
2029-01-14
Magnitude
0.871
Sun diameter
Obscuration
81.6%
Sun area covered
Saros
#117
50 of 71
Gamma
1.055
Shadow axis (Earth-radii)
Cities from the WorldClockTools clock catalog that fall in the visibility band. Each link goes to the local clock page for that city.
Partial-eclipse zone
Every phase of a solar eclipse outside of totality requires ISO 12312-2 certified solar viewing glasses or an equivalent solar filter on every optical instrument (telescope, binoculars, camera lens). The same standard applies to partial solar eclipses. This is a partial-only event, so safe viewing requires filters at every point during the eclipse.
Local sun altitude, the path crossing time of day, and recent weather climatology drive site selection. NASA's interactive eclipse map (linked below) gives the exact altitude and time for any coordinates on the path.
Editorial dossier
Historical significance
The January 14 2029 partial solar eclipse reaches a maximum magnitude of 0.8714 — meaning roughly 87% of the Sun's diameter is obscured from the point of greatest eclipse in northern Canada. It is member 15 of 72 in Solar Saros 151, a young series that began with a partial eclipse on August 14 1776 (the year of American independence) and which will not produce its first central eclipse until 2065. The 2029 event is one of four solar eclipses in calendar year 2029 — a rare 'four-eclipse' year — alongside June 12 and July 11 partial solar eclipses and the November 5 annular.
Comparison to other eclipses
2029 is unusual: it contains four solar eclipses (one of only a handful of such years in the 21st century), and three of those four are partial, with greatest eclipse latitudes pushed to the high northern hemisphere — a consequence of where Saros 151 sits in its young, partial-only phase. The January 14 event is the most prominent for U.S. observers, with deeper coverage than any U.S. partial since the 2024 total. For continental U.S. cities, this is the deepest partial solar eclipse until the August 12 2045 totality crosses the country.
Astrophotography context
Greatest eclipse occurs at 17:13 UTC, north of Hudson Bay in Nunavut, with the Sun very low (under 5 degrees) and obscuration near 87%. The eclipse is partial-only — no path of annularity touches Earth — so plan as a sunset / low-altitude shoot from accessible latitudes. From Chicago and New York, mid-eclipse falls around 11:40 EST with roughly 50-60% obscuration and the Sun at 25-30 degrees altitude. From Mexico City, ~30% obscuration around 10:15 CST. Use a solar filter throughout: there is no totality, no Baily's beads phase, no filter-off moment. The crescent-Sun pinhole shadows from foliage make this an excellent landscape eclipse — frame against skylines and natural foreground.
Top viewing destinations
Sources
Eclipse data depth
Reference fields include Partial Solar Eclipse 2029-01-14: Saros context, magnitude / obscuration, path geometry, visibility countries, and city cross-references.
Data source: NASA / JPL
Eclipse data from NASA/JPL — Fred Espenak & Jean Meeus, Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses and Five Millennium Canon of Lunar Eclipses (NASA Technical Publications NASA/TP–2006-214141 and NASA/TP–2009-214172). Public domain; re-published here with attribution.
NASA page for this eclipse (path map & circumstances)eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov
Greatest eclipse: January 14, 2029 at 17:13 UTC
