Stream It Or Skip It: ‘NOVA: Great American Eclipse’ On PBS Is A Great Way To Prepare For The 2024 Solar Eclipse

PBS is airing a special as part of its long-running NOVA series called Great American Eclipse. Filled with information about the total solar eclipse coming on April 8, 2024, this hour-long show answers all the FAQs that you might have about the event, from when and where it’s happening, how you should prepare for it, what safety precautions to take, as well as providing detailed history lessons on how our understanding of the sun has evolved over time. Educational and entertaining, it’s a must-watch for anyone gearing up to nerd out inside the path of totality.

GREAT AMERICAN ECLIPSE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “April 8, 2024. A rare and astonishing natural phenomenon, a total solar eclipse,” a narrator explains, adding that eclipses have “filled people with wonder since the earliest times.”

The Gist: The NOVA special Great American Eclipse is a primer on what a total solar eclipse is and how it happens (it’s when the Earth, moon, and sun perfectly align so that the moon blocks the sun entirely, but chances are, if you’re watching this you already knew that), as well as the ways that scientists use these extremely rare occasions to study the sun’s outer atmosphere in ways they otherwise couldn’t.

This hour-long special goes into detail about the upcoming eclipse, including it’s path of totality (the area within the northern hemisphere that will experience total darkness when the moon blocks the sun’s rays), as well as the extent that other areas of the country will see a partial eclipse and what safety precautions to take when viewing it.

But the 2024 eclipse is just the starting point for the rest of the special which offers a history lesson about how eclipses and solar patterns were discovered, and modern scientific study of the sun, including our unprecedented ability to enter the sun’s atmosphere, something that seems pretty miraculous in itself if you think about it. At 2 million degrees Farenheit, the sun’s corona seems like it would make it impossible to get close to, but in 2018, NASA launched a new satellite called the Parker Solar Probe that was built to withstand incredible heat and in 2021 it became the first spacecraft to enter the sun’s atmosphere, truly a miracle of modern science.

In every culture throughout history, eclipses have always been opportunities to learn more about our universe, and this special gives equal weight to what’s already been discovered, what we are still trying to understand, and the technology we’re using to do that.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Around the time of the 2017 solar eclipse, PBS aired a similar show called Eclipse Over America. While it contained some of the game general information and soundbites about eclipses, it’s astonishing how many scientific advancements have been made since then, and Great American Eclipse has quite a bit of new information compared to that special.

Our Take: There are a few things happening in this special, and they’re all fascinating and educational, and dropping at the perfect time to engage our peak interest in the eclipse. The first portion details what you can expect from the upcoming eclipse, the majority of the special is a combination history and science lesson. While a good amount of the show focuses on how incredible technological advances as NASA and beyond have helped us with our solar studies, what feels even more impressive in many ways is what it tells us about ancient study and understanding of the sun.

Carvings left behind by Indigenous tribes in America not only recorded instances of eclipses, but show that the way their agrarian societies use information about the sun’s patterns to help their harvests. Ancient Babylonian scholars were able to track and predict when eclipses would happen thousands of years ago, and in the 18th century, British astronomer Edmund Halley would apply the newly-discovered idea of gravity to correctly predict the specific path and down-to-the-minute timing of future eclipses. It’s a great reminder that science really does take years, sometimes decades or centuries, to fact-find. We might take for granted that this information is easily discoverable now, but it’s incredible to think about the timeline and global effort it took for it to be so.

There are a couple of different ways one could watch this special: if you’re a fair-weather science fan who just wants a brief understanding of what’s going on on April 8th, you could get away with watching the first half hour and still sound impressive to your friends when you tell them you know about the Parker Solar Probe, or how peculiar it is that the sun’s surface temperature is only 10,000 degrees. But if you stick around for the entire thing, you’ll learn even more about some of the more enduring mysteries of the sun, and how eclipses can help advance our understanding of them.

Parting Shot: A series of experts and scientists all explain how special it is to experience an eclipse, and as the sun literally sets on the show, one of them excitedly says, “Don’t miss it!”

Memorable Dialogue: “You have never seen a shadow this spectacular.”

Our Call: If there’s one thing this show wants you to walk away believing, it’s that for something that only last 4.5 minutes, this year’s eclipse might just be a life-changing event, for both your average viewer as well as for scientists. Eclipse cycles, though predictable, are irregular, and we won’t experience another total eclipse for about 20 years, and Great American Eclipse is a great way to appreciate and fully understand the significance of this one. STREAM IT!

Great American Eclipse airs April 3 at 8PM ET/PT on PBS.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.