I’m going to be traveling to the eclipse next month. It would be awesome of I could see the eclipse path as an overlay on OSM. Maybe there’s a way to import all eclipse paths from nasa, past future and present from some ATOM or JSON feed so nobody’s manually drawing lines. Or perhaps there’s just a formula anyone can use to calculate the path of all eclipses.
I’ve traveled before for eclipses and there’s surprisingly few street/highway maps that include eclipse paths! Zero that show eclipse on navigation apps.
But I use highway, eclipse path, topographical, and cloud data as a passenger while we’re in the car on the morning of the eclipse, to try to find a nice high spot with a great view of the path.
Would eclipse paths be welcome on OSM being they’re not a feature, physically speaking, of terrestrial Earth?
Hello.
Eclipses are fabulous and there are platforms dedicated and specialized in various astronomical events.
Surely someone with more experience will tell you the same thing as me.
I don’t think it is possible to map in OSM a non-physical property on the earth, what you want is to map a shadow.
Surely the appropriate TAGs will be found for the various eclipse observation sites, as there are for wildlife observation and other types of events, but the passage of an eclipse I don’t think is possible, the damage caused by a hurricane is mapped but not the path of the hurricane.
What would be the cartographic utility of adding the path of the shadow of an eclipse in the past, present and future?
Without a doubt, amateurs and professionals dedicated to astronomy would see the greatest possible use in it, just as an oceanographer would like to map ocean currents in OSM or a biologist would like to map the migrations of different species.
I agree to what @afgb1977 has already said. I believe that having a map of all eclipse paths would be interesting to a lot of people with astronomic interest and I also believe such map could be created on the base of OSM but I do not see any good in implementing the paths directly into OSM.
Imo it would require the creation of a new OSM based service. Probably you will find someone to realize it together with you.
I was searching around for an eclipse map, and I found this: Interactive map for the 2024 Eclipse Simulator | Eclipse2024.org. What do you know, the background map is OSM-Carto! And credited suitably too . I agree with the other posters that you should probably not map the path as a feature in OSM itself: the database is not for transient events, and such a feature would be so gigantic as to be virtually un-maintainable. While it might be hard to import this whole area into a navigation app, the site seems suitable for referencing while you’re driving around.
A fun project could be, if you know what towns you are targeting in advance, you could do some review in advance to spruce them up, like adding major POIs or even TIGER cleanup. As you probably know if you map much in the US, many rural areas only have roads due to a long-ago import from the TIGER database, which is notorious for its poor alignment and sometimes even fictional roads. Many of these rural areas often haven’t been touched since. Fixing these in advance would benefit your journey the day of, and improve the map in those locations permanently!
Best of luck, I hope you find clear skies! I saw the 2017 eclipse in Illinois and it was truly spectacular.
I have simplified and clipped the eclipse geodata file from NASA and added it as an Overlay option on TIGERMap. The centerline should be accurate to about 100 meters and the penumbra polygon to within a few kilometers.
The area covered by the eclipse is very parallel and looks weird. In reality the bigger the distance to the equator (roughtly) the larger gets the shadow area.
The parallelness (?) is probably due to the OSM projection method and probably right
It’s not OSM, but I threw this together as a planning tool a while back.
Traffic is probably going to be HORRENDOUS, and places of high elevation targeted by many. It was a nightmare getting out of the track area in 2017, too.
It’s totally possible I have oversimplified the polygon or misunderstood the projection of the original data. If someone spots something egregious I am happy to take a look.
timeanddate website has added a page with both a map and a search tool. Here is a link to one of the best spots, the Mont Megantic, Qc (astronomical observatory), where there will be activities during the day. timeanddate provides time corresponding to the various phases of the eclipse at one point. The partial eclipse lasts 2.5 h and the total ecllipse phase lasts ~ 3 minutes. The best of this if clear sky and good eyes protection !
Sorry for interjecting into the discussion, but I’ll add my two cents. There is a page with interactive maps of total, annular and hybrid eclipse belts. Unfortunately, it is not based on OSM, but on Google Maps. It would be great to have an OSM version.
. I agree with the other posters that you should probably not map the path as a feature in OSM itself: the database is not for transient events, and such a feature would be so gigantic as to be virtually un-maintainable. While it might be hard to import this whole area into a navigation app, the site seems suitable for referencing while you’re driving around.
