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title: Solar Eclipse Vocabulary | TIME
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# Solar Eclipse Vocabulary

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<!-- video src="https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/4KCHqOXl.m3u8" -->
## Video: Solar Eclipse Vocabulary

[Watch (HLS stream): Solar Eclipse Vocabulary](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/4KCHqOXl.m3u8) (2:37)

![Solar Eclipse Vocabulary](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/4KCHqOXl/poster.jpg?width=720)

_Published 2017-08-17. TIME For Kids reporter Caroline Curran learns from NASA Solar Eclipse Educator Charles Fulco about the solar eclipse vocabulary we all need to know._


---

Jul 27, 2023 10:28 PM UTC

---

## More From This Series

[All Videos](https://time.com/video/)

[The Most Spectacular Footage Of Europe's Solar Eclipse](/video/kzaS23ou/)

### The Most Spectacular Footage Of Europe's Solar Eclipse

[Watch The Solar Eclipse](/video/i904Q64p/)

### Watch The Solar Eclipse

[Partial Solar Eclipse in Rome](/video/5tBjq7bb/)

### Partial Solar Eclipse in Rome

---


## Transcript

[ MUSIC ] Hi I'm Time for Kids kid reporter Caroline Curran. Today I'm joined by Charles Fulco, NASA solar eclipse educator. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me Caroline. So we at Time for Kids are calling this the great American solar eclipse. What does the word solar mean? Well, Kelly, solar simply means pertaining to the sun. And a solar eclipse means the sun is being covered by the moon for when observed around the earth. So I can demonstrate this by taking the earth and the moon. And you can see that there is a shadow being produced on the earth from the moon. That's a solar eclipse.

And the moon produces two types of shadows. It produces a darker, inner shadow called the umbra. And that's where you'd wanna see totality from. It also produces the much bigger, lighter outer shadow called the penumbra and that's where most people will see a partial eclipse. A lunar eclipse means about the moon. So two weeks after a solar eclipse, the moon travels in its orbit to the other side of the earth where it could go into the earth's shadow. So what do we call the flecks of lights that appear behind the umbra or penumbra? Well, Caroline, as an eclipse becomes total, you get some strange things happening that you only see during a total eclipse, and this is one of them.

Come over to the [ INAUDIBLE ] with me and I'll explain. So the movement is traveling about 2, 000 miles an hour. And on an eclipse day it'll start off with a little, tiny notch in the sun. Eventually, about 30 minutes into the eclipse, you're gonna have a sun that looks like this. So the moon takes about an hour to cover the sun, so as the moon keeps going over the sun, more and more of it disappears. As the moon begins to slide over the sun and completely cover it, You get what's called Baily's beads. Now, the moon surface has mountains on it. So the mountains actually jut into the sun's disk, and they block part of the sun's thin crescent.

And it only lasts for about maybe five or ten seconds. But the last Baily's bead to remain, that was given the name the diamond ring effect, because it's just this one Glorious, beautiful piece of light surrounding, the darkened new moon as the new moon begins to appear. So, within about a span of 30 seconds, you go from a sliver sun, to Baily's beads, to a diamond ring. And finally to totality. That's when the sun's corona Comes into view. The corona is the outer atmosphere of the sun that's only visible during totality. It's actually made of hot gases that surround the sun. Caroline, you've never seen anything so beautiful as a corona at a total eclipse of the sun.

[ MUSIC ]

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