Total Solar Eclipse USA in Aircraft?

Will there be a total solar eclipse today in MSFS while flying over the USA, Texas to Maine?

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Why not set the time to what it should be, and see. You have total control over the time, and weather. Clear sky, certain location, and certain time. If they have the moon location correct you should see the two approach at least, but I doubt they are actual 3D objects that affect each other, with one passing in front of the other, but there is only one way to find out.

https://www.greatamericaneclipse.com/

I hope so, but I swear last time I tried to follow one a couple of years back, It just showed what it would look like in my part of the world IRL, not a total one where it should be.

Alternate theory: It was partial when I started the flight, maybe the sim doesn’t update the moon / sun’s state during a flight (e.g. the moon’s phase - full / crescent / new / etc).

Hopefully that was fixed if this was the case. :slight_smile:

It sort of is. You can go to Indianapolis, set the time to about 15:06 local and see - nothing. You need to add a cloud cover and apply quite a bit of density to filter the sun’s brightness - then you can see the moon (incorrectly) cutting off a bit of the top of the sun. There is no other visual effect than this.

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Just tried spawning at KDFW, with lens flare turned off so I don’t have to mess with clouds. Remember kids, don’t do this in real life!

10:30
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First touch at roughly 10:35:
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12:00
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12:00
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13:26
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So this location, despite what it says on a website online, is not quite total.

At MMGR:

W99

No matter where I spawn I can’t seem to get better than this, and I tried a few hundred miles East, and West of the path.

I think the eclipse is somewhat baked in. Spawning in at CYZS Coral Harbor, which is on Southampton Island, which is nearly 2000nm North of Dallas, and I still get the same sun effect.

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I did try a few places in the southern hemisphere, and couldn’t see it at all, as you would expect.

If you are going to teleport around to test this, don’t choose the WB-Sim 172. :slight_smile:

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If you spawn at KTRL, you’ll be pretty close to the real center of the eclipse path, where total occlusion lasted almost five minutes. (I was just a couple of miles off the centerline in Kaufman for the eclipse.) If the sim’s sun/moon positioning is close to right, you should get a total eclipse there.

You can try it, as I showed above. The path of totality is 125 miles across if I remember right. I tried many airports dancing along its path, and going from 50-100 miles East, and West of it. As I also showed i tried nearly 2000 miles away the path of totality, and got pretty much exactly the same results as on it, making me think that effect is baked in somehow.

What I was expecting to see is that the further you got away from totality, the maximum the sun would be obscured by would reduce, but it didn’t. Maximum was always that same crescent shape. I didn’t spend much more time on it, but I know that in some locations you got nothing at all, and I was expecting to find some locations where the sun would just slightly obscure the disk, but nothing more than that.