Hospitals are on standby. The total eclipse starts off the coast of Nova Scotia and travels at about 1,500 miles an hour across the Atlantic. It makes landfall at Britain's Isles of Scilly and then passes over France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan. Birds will stop singing and return to their nests. Temperatures will plummet dramatically, a strong breeze will rise.
Earth experiences a bizarre twilight and the horizon shows all the colours of dawn.
Weather experts say Britain faces only a 45 percent chance of witnessing the eclipse in its totality because of likely cloud covering. That has not deterred four million people from planning to converge on Cornwall and Devon in western England. Cornish women were advised nine months ago not to get pregnant in case the roads were jammed on Eclipse Day. Giant boulders have been rolled into place around revered archaeological sites for fear of invasion by New Age ravers. Arch Druid Ed Pryn has built a mini-Stonehenge monument in the garden of his bungalow and will be ''marrying'' couples in pagan ceremonies throughout the day.