Antumbra

The antumbra is the part of a shadow that lies beyond the tip of the umbra. The umbra is a cone that narrows to a point; past that point the shadow widens again into a second, inverted cone. From inside it, the blocking body looks smaller than the light source behind it and sits entirely within its disc. At a solar eclipse, Earth falls in the Moon's antumbra whenever the Moon is too far away for its umbra to reach the ground, which happens when it is near apogee, the far point of its orbit. People inside the antumbra then see an annular eclipse: the Moon passes centrally across the Sun but leaves a bright ring of sunlight around its edge. Inside the antumbra the Moon typically hides 80 to 95% of the Sun's area, so the light dims and takes on a flat, odd quality, but the sky never goes dark and the corona stays hidden. The Sun is never fully covered there, so eye protection is needed from start to finish. The umbra falls short of Earth a little more often than it reaches it, which is why annular eclipses are slightly more common than total ones. The antumbra next touches down on 6 February 2027, across southern Chile, Argentina, the South Atlantic and West Africa, and again on 26 January 2028, from the Galápagos to Portugal and southern Spain.