Watch a total eclipse on the Web

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

Nothing can compare with being right in the track of totality for a few precious minutes, even if you have to travel thousands of miles to be there. But what if you're stuck in the States? Will Americans be totally in the dark when the moon's shadow sweeps over Earth early Wednesday?

Never fear: Even though Wednesday's total solar eclipse won't come anywhere near North America, you can still see a small-screen version of the spectacle on your computer monitor, courtesy of the Internet and a fearless band of Webcasters.

There are even a couple of consolations for computer-based eclipse watchers: You might be able to get five or six glimpses of the blacked-out sun, depending on how many Webcams you can click onto in the course of the morning. And you won't have to worry about protecting your eyes, either.

In the real world, Wednesday's eclipse will be visible only along a narrow track running through South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa and Asia. A partial eclipse can be seen from wider swaths of those continents, and Europe as well, as laid out in our guide to eclipse viewing. Viewing times for totality can vary from 3:35 to 6:43 a.m. ET, depending on whether you're in Brazil or Mongolia.

But in cyberspace, the main event starts at 5 a.m. ET, when NASA and the San Francisco-based Exploratorium start their satellite broadcast from a Roman-era amphitheater in the Turkish city of Side (pronounced "See-day"). That show will be seen in more than 90 museums, planetariums and other viewing sites around the world, and will be streamed via MSNBC.com's News Video page as well as through NASA TV, the Exploratorium and other outlets.

This could even rank as the first real-world, real-time eclipse witnessed in a virtual world.

"It turns out that the Exploratorium is going to stream the real total solar eclipse into the virtual world of Second Life. A Web developer actually created a 2nd-century Roman theater similar to where we're going to be in Side, with a virtual projection screen," Exploratorium spokeswoman Leslie Patterson told MSNBC.com. (Second Lifers can experience the event at three virtual locations: Fame, NMC Campus or Lukanida.)

Slide show    Waiting for totality People from around the world gather in Side, Turkey to watch the solar eclipse.

In the virtual world as well as plain old cyberspace, the Exploratorium/NASA show will feature reports from Libya by NASA's Fred Espenak, arguably the world's foremost eclipse guru, and from Ghana by physicist Kennedy Reed of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The climax comes at 5:55 a.m. ET, when Side is due to be plunged into darkness for a delicious four minutes.

But the amphitheater show isn't the only game in town. Just down the street in Side, an educational team from Florida and North Carolina will be streaming their own eclipse views via EclipseLive.com.

This is the eighth eclipse for the EclipseLive.com teachers, and during their last outing, the Web traffic was so overwhelming that the computer links basically broke down, said John Berryman, a physics professor at Palm Beach Community College in Florida who is one of the effort's organizers.

"I've hit my limit at 1.8 million users," Berryman told MSNBC.com. "This time I'm going to go for 10 million."

Berryman had a few words of advice for eclipse-chasing Web users: "Get on early, and if you can't see anything, dump the cache and try to reload the page — because a lot of the viewers might have older machines that don't dump the cache the way they're supposed to."

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