Total Solar Eclipse Set to Cut a Path Across South America Today

A total solar eclipse will plunge a swath of South America into darkness Tuesday in the world’s first total solar eclipse since 2017.

“The July 2nd eclipse is the first total solar eclipse since the Transcontinental Total Solar Eclipse in summer of 2017,” explained Dr. Paige Godfrey, an astrophysicist at the Slooh telescope network, in a statement emailed to Fox News. “That was almost two years ago now, and people are still talking about it as the greatest celestial event of their lifetimes. That event has had a lasting effect that has heightened excitement for many of these to come.”

Millions are expected to gaze at the cosmic spectacle that will begin at 2:24 p.m. EDT in the South Pacific and sweep along a path 6,800 miles across open waters to Chile and Argentina, the only places that the total eclipse will be seen aside from an uninhabited island out in the ocean.

The line of totality also passes within a mile of the site for the planned Giant Magellan Telescope at La Serena, on the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile.