A total solar eclipse will sweep over mainland Spain, Iceland and Greenland on Aug. 12, with totality lasting up to two minutes and 18 seconds along the best part of the track. Michael Zeiler will be aboard a cruise ship in a Greenland fjord, ready for his 13th total solar eclipse and planning to film toward the north as the Moon covers the Sun.
It is the kind of date that pulls in both skywatchers and scientists because the same day also brings six neighboring planets into an arc before dawn and the peak of the Perseid meteor shower after nightfall under the new moon. The eclipse will not be confined to the far north, either. A partial eclipse will be visible across much of Europe and West Africa, as well as Canada, the northern U.S., Alaska and Siberia.
The numbers tell the story of how wide the shadow will travel and how narrow full darkness will be. The umbra will race along a 5,130-mile course in about 1 1/2 hours, but maximum totality will occur off Iceland’s west coast. By the time the eclipse reaches Portugal and Spain, totality will have dwindled to about a minute or so, which is why the phrase sweeping over Spain can sound grander than the actual moments of darkness there. Even so, Dublin will see 94% coverage of the Sun, Oslo will see 83%, Montreal will get an 18% bite, New York 9% and Norfolk, Virginia, 2%.
That contrast is what gives the eclipse its pull. The path mostly runs over the Atlantic, and Spain is still waiting for the first total solar eclipse to reach mainland territory in more than a century. The European Space Agency will host a live webcast from Spain’s Astrophysical Observatory of Javalambre and a public celebration in Leon, while NASA and the Virtual Telescope Project will also provide coverage. Two of the European Space Agency’s space telescopes will watch the eclipsed Sun and its corona, and Proba-3 will try to take before-and-after shots even though it will not be in position to observe the event from Earth.
Special eclipse glasses will still be needed even where only part of the Sun is covered. And the wait for a longer total eclipse is already fixed on next summer, when an even longer event is expected to sweep from Spain to North Africa and the Middle East for about 6 1/2 minutes of darkness, turning the current eclipse into a preview of what comes next.
