Some of us living in the Northern Hemisphere will be able to view a solar eclipse on Friday 20 March 2015. Most people will only see a partial eclipse, but some lucky people living in a particular region will experience a total eclipse.  When this happens the Sun is completely obscured and it goes dark during the period of time that the Sun is covered.

Throughout this post I will use the term “eclipse” to mean an eclipse of the Sun or solar eclipse. I will talk about eclipses of the Moon in a future post.

The path of totality, where a total eclipse can be seen is shown as the dark band in the map below

As you can see from the map, most of this area is uninhabited, with the notable exception of the Faroe Islands (population 50,000) where a total eclipse lasting over 2 and half minutes will be visible. This…