Don't look now, but eclipse is near.

Byline: JEFF WRIGHT The Register-Guard

Jean Grendler still remembers her first solar eclipse: She was a 7-year-old girl in Eugene and her father, a railroad boilermaker, let her look at the sun through his welder's mask.

More than 40 years later, Grendler is looking forward to another eclipse - the one that will block roughly half the sun before dusk Monday. But this time, Grendler will have plenty of other options for safe viewing.

A member of the Eugene Astronomical Society, Grendler will be at the College Hill water reservoir where she and other society members will have special-filter telescopes, pinhole projection boxes and Mylar solar eclipse sunglasses available to the public.

The Lane Planetarium is holding a similar outdoor gathering, followed by a special program inside the planetarium.

Monday's eclipse will be on display across a broad swath of the western United States, Mexico, Canada and Asia. The moon's shadow will follow an 8,700-mile path, racing eastward across the Pacific Ocean at 1,000 mph. In Asia, across the international date line, the eclipse actually occurs Tuesday.

The celestial event is called an annular, or ring-shaped, eclipse. Because the moon will be closer to the Earth than during total eclipses, it will only partially cover the sun. In some places, such as Mexico's Baja Peninsula, as much as 99 percent of the sun will be covered. In Lane County, about 57 percent will be hidden.

The 57 percent refers to the eclipse's "magnitude," or the amount of the sun's diameter that will be covered. But the eclipse's "obscuration," the amount of the sun's total area hidden, will be 47 percent, Grendler says.

Compared with other eclipses "that took just little bites" out of the sun, Monday's eclipse should be pretty dramatic, Grendler says. "It will make the sun look like an artist's rendering of the crescent moon."

A total eclipse can make it seem like night in the middle of the day - and drop the outdoor temperature within minutes, says Jon Elvert, director of the Lane Planetarium. Because Monday's is only a partial eclipse - and comes near sunset instead of the middle of the day - the effect will be less striking, more like a light cloud passing in front of the sun.

Still, it's the first eclipse of such magnitude in Lane County since 1994, Elvert says. It will be the last eclipse visible anywhere in the United States until 2005. The next total eclipse in the Northwest doesn't arrive until 2017.

Monday's event could be a bust, of course, if clouds get in the way. For now, the forecast calls for mostly sunny skies and highs in the 70s.

In a partial eclipse, it's still crucial to avoid gazing directly at the sun. The result can be "eclipse blindness," a serious eye injury that can leave temporary or permanent blurred vision or blind spots.

Elvert says any eclipse is a coincidence of cosmic proportions - considering the moon is 400 times closer to the Earth than the sun, yet appears to be the same size as the sun when seen from Earth.

The eclipse comes only two months after another heavenly marvel: the alignment of five planets and the moon, all visible in the Western sky at dusk. The planetarium and astrological society planned special events around that as well.

"From a marketing point of view, this is good for us," Elvert says. "This community in particular really enjoys this kind of natural phenomenon."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.