Total solar eclipse, 12 August 2026
Visible from northern North America, west Africa, Europe, with the central track crossing the Arctic, Greenland, Iceland and Spain.
At greatest eclipse the Moon is 366,979 km away and 32.6 arcminutes across. The Sun, 31.6 arcminutes across, is near its smallest — Earth is close to aphelion at this time of year. The Moon is 3.1% wider than the Sun in the sky, so it covers it completely and the corona comes out.
Never look at the Sun without a filter made for it. Eclipse glasses or a solar filter, not sunglasses and not a camera. The one exception is totality itself — the couple of minutes when the disc is completely covered — and only inside the path above.
- Greatest eclipse
- 17:47:05 UT
- Type
- Total solar eclipse
- Longest totality
- 2m18s
- Moon's apparent size
- 32.6′ vs the Sun's 31.6′
Date, time and duration: NASA, Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses (opens in a new tab). Angular sizes and the Moon's distance computed here, for 17:47:05 UT.
The globe is computed here from the same Sun and Moon as everything else on this site, by intersecting the Sun-Moon shadow axis with the Earth minute by minute. Four things about it are checked against NASA on every build: the time of greatest eclipse, the countries the line crosses, whether the cone reaches the ground at all — which is what makes an eclipse total rather than annular — and the length of totality, which comes out within a percent of NASA's on all eight. The Earth is modelled with its real shape here, flattened at the poles, which is what makes that last figure hold for the short grazing eclipses as well as the long ones. What is not modelled: refraction at the horizon, and the fact that a shadow lands on mountains rather than on sea level. For whether the track crosses your actual street, go to NASA's own map (opens in a new tab).
Coastlines: Natural Earth 1:110m, public domain.