The solar eclipse will take place on Monday, August 21st, and will last less than two and a half minutes for those of us seeing it from the ground.
NASA, however, has different plans for viewing the eclipse.
A team of NASA-funded scientists will take in the eclipse for more than seven minutes from two retrofitted WB-57F jet planes.
The two teams will chase the darkness (the moon's shadow) across America on the day of the eclipse as part of a research project.
They will be able to capture the clearest images of the Sun’s outer atmosphere taken to date, and the first ever thermal images of Mercury in addition to being able to view the eclipse three times longer than those of us on the ground.
“Extending the observing time and going to very high altitude might allow us to see a few events or track waves that would be essentially invisible in just two minutes of observations from the ground,” says Dan Seaton, co-investigator of the project and researcher at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado.
Although we won’t see a total eclipse here in the Okanagan, we will observe a partial eclipse. For everything you need to know about how to have the best time watching the partial solar eclipse, click here.
