The moon will shroud the sun and cast parts of the planet into a moment of darkness on Monday and millions of eclipse followers across North America are getting set to take in the event.

Parts of the United States will be in the path of totality and NASA says people living between Salem, Oregon and Charleston, South Carolina will be able to see a total solar eclipse.

Experts say the sun is 400 times wider than the moon and 400 times further away so they appear to be the same size during an eclipse, which occurs when they are on the same angular path.

“It’s just an alignment of the sun, the earth and the moon,” said Melanie Hall, TELUS Spark Public Programs Manager. “What happens is the moon blocks out the light from the sun for a small amount of time. So it’s travelling and it goes straight across the sun in our sky and then it creates a shadow basically on earth as it moves, so this one is moving from the west coast to the east coast of North America, the shadow in the path of totality.”

In Calgary, a partial eclipse will be visible at about 10:20 a.m. and experts say it will disappear just before 1:00 p.m. local time.

“In Calgary we’re going to get a partial eclipse and about 80 percent of our sun is going to be covered by the moon so this is not something that you see every day,” said Hall. “Total eclipses do happen often, they just don’t always happen where people live, maybe they are over the ocean or in a different place on earth. This one goes straight through North America, the path of totality is just a couple hundred kilometres south of here, through Montana, and so a lot of people are getting really excited. It’s a beautiful sight and so it’s kind of something that in the U.S. hasn’t happened since 1979.”

Experts say people should avoid looking directly at the uneclipsed or partially eclipsed sun as it can damage the eyes.

“It’s weirdly tempting so you might feel like, oh it’s okay, it’s not as bright but it’s still very dangerous for your eyes to look at the sun and you can seriously damage them so there’s lots of really safe ways to look through it,” said Hall. “You never want to put your eye directly through any type of lens because it’s very dangerous and it’s actually concentrating the light from the sun so it’s almost worse. So you always want to be really careful. With your iPhone you can put it up to the sun but you never want to look through that so your iPhone will actually darken the sun and it will try to do some auto-correct and you might be able to get a good picture but looking through your iPhone to the sun is still dangerous because if you move that that goes right into your eyes.”

A viewing party is being held at TELUS Spark on Monday and activities get underway at 10:00.

“We’re really excited at TELUS Spark to invite all of our friends from Calgary to come and view the eclipse. We’ve got lots of telescopes to view the sun so you can get up close and personal with it, which have some special filters on them, so solar telescopes. We’re going to be making pinhole viewers with all of our visitors so you can view that as a projection and enjoy it that way,” added Hall.

For more information on the viewing party at TELUS Spark, click HERE.

NASA will also livestream the event online, click HERE for the link.