What does a solar eclipse look like?
Places in the path of the eclipse will begin to grow dark more than an hour before totality, as the moon nibbles at the sun’s rim. Just before the sun is totally eclipsed, the light shining through the valleys along the moon’s edge look like a celestial necklace, known as Baily’s beads. This is soon reduced to what looks like a diamond ring. Then the sun is obscured, and its corona a radiant halo of superheated gas that surrounds the sun becomes visible and the stars appear in the sky as if it were nighttime.
