The Moon is close enough that its shadow cone still has width when it lands. The dark tip
— the umbra — reaches the ground, and the corridor it draws there is
solid ink. From inside it the Sun is not dimmed but gone, so the corona, always
there, is finally visible.
Not to scale — the real gaps are about 25× wider.
Annular
The Moon is too far to fill the Sun, so the cone closes before the Earth and
reopens as the antumbra. What lands is flat and a tenth short of a total’s
black, and that tenth is the ring: a twenty-first of the Sun’s radius,
thinner than most pictures of it.
Not to scale — the real gaps are about 25× wider.
Hybrid
The tip ends exactly on the Earth’s surface: total where the curve rises to
meet it, annular at the two ends. The corridor cannot show a difference that small
— under two per cent — so it is drawn as a total’s. The sky shows all
of it.
Not to scale — the real gaps are about 25× wider.
Partial
The dark tip misses the Earth entirely; only the penumbra lands. There is no
corridor, and the wash it leaves is drawn as a screen turned down, because a
partial mattered least: it is the quietest of the four. The median bite takes
0.47 of the Sun’s width.