Eclipse 2026: Where, When & How to Watch (Both Hemispheres)

0:00 Anna: Somewhere over the Arctic this afternoon, the sun is about to go out. Not for long, a couple of minutes at most. But for the first time on mainland Western Europe since 1999. Avery: And here in the studio, it's the middle of a Sydney afternoon. So we're gonna watch it the way most of you will on a screen in the small hours, wide eyed. Welcome to Astronomy AstroDailyPod. I'm Avery. Anna: And I'm anna. It's Wednesday 12th August. Today, the only total solar eclipse of the how to catch it wherever you are, a NASA jet that chases the shadow.

0:36 A magnetic field caught in the act of building a star. Why some worlds cook themselves alive. And tonight, a moonless meteor shower. Let's go. If you only clock one thing in the sky this year, it's happening in the next few hours. Today the moon's shadow falls across the far north of the planet and gives a lucky narrow strip of the world a total solar eclipse. The only one of 2026. Avery: Give us the geography because this is a strange one. It doesn't run the usual way. Anna: It doesn't. Most totalities race roughly west to east.

1:14 This one arcs up and over the pole. It begins at sunrise over the Taymyr Peninsula in Arctic Russia, sweeps across the top of the world and down the eastern side of Greenland, crosses western Iceland, Reykjavik included, then runs out over the North Atlantic, clips a tiny corner of northeastern Portugal and finishes by crossing northern Spain from Galicia to the Mediterranean, ending near the Balearics right at sunset. Avery: And um, this is a big deal specifically for Europe. Anna: A uh, huge deal.

1:48 It's the first total solar eclipse over western Mainland Europe since 11 August 1999, 27 years almost to the day. For Spain it's the first since 1905, for Iceland the first since 1954. People have booked these spots years out. Avery: So if I'm standing in the path, what do I actually get? Anna: Not long, but unforgettable. Maximum totality is about 2 minutes and 18 seconds out over the Atlantic near the centerline. On land it's shorter. In Reykjavik, totality lands around 17:48 Universal Time. That's just before six in the evening local and gives you a bit over a minute.

2:32 Out on the Iceland's Snaefelsnes peninsula you do better then over in northern Spain, totality falls around 18:27 to 18:33 UT that's 8:27 to 8:33 in the evening, local evening. Avery: So the sun's getting low, very low. Anna: That's the catch. In Spain, the sun sits only about 10 degrees up on the north coast and as little as 4 degrees near the Balearic Sea. Gorgeous if you've got a clean horizon. But a hill, a forest, a building and you miss it. And the weather split is almost poetic. Iceland is climatologically the cloudier bet, Spain, the sunnier one.

3:14 But Spain makes you pay with that low sun. Avery: Okay, now the part most of our audience needs, because most of us are nowhere near that strip, start with North America, our biggest audience. Anna: North America gets a genuine partial this afternoon. No totality anywhere on the continent, but a real bite out of the sun. And the further northeast you are, the bigger the bite. Eastern Canada does best. Nova Scotia sees around a third of the sun covered, about 33%. Northern Maine gets close to 28.

3:46 Montreal about 18. Boston around 16, peaking near 155 in the afternoon Eastern time. New York around 9 or 10% about 1:54. Eastern Toronto about 8, Washington D.C. about 10. And Alaska gets a lovely one in the morning. Fairbanks around 37%. Avery: And um, crucially, that's a partial. So the rules are different. Anna: Completely different. And I'll say it plainly, if you're seeing a partial, the sun is never fully covered, so you must keep certified eclipse glasses on the entire time. We'll do the full safety line at the end, but that's the headline for North America.

4:28 Glasses on, start to finish. Avery: Europe, outside the path, a deep partial Anna: low in the evening sky. London around 91% covered. Paris, about 92. Berlin 85. Vienna 87. Dramatic, but again, partial. So eye protection throughout. Avery: And then there's us, the Southern Hemisphere, Australia, New Zealand. Anna: Be honest with them straight up, we see nothing of this one directly, not a sliver. It's an entirely northern hemisphere event. But, and this is the good news, you can absolutely watch it live.

5:05 NASA time and date and the exploratorium are all streaming from the path, including telescope feeds out of Spain in Australian Eastern time. That coverage runs roughly half past one to six in the morning Thursday, with the totality highlights landing somewhere around three to half past 4m am AEST, set an alarm, make a coffee and you'll see the corona in real time. Avery: That corona being the whole reason people chase these. Anna: That's it for those two minutes. The moon blocks the blinding disc of the sun and reveals the corona, the faint, pearly outer atmosphere we almost never get to see.

5:45 It's not just beautiful, it's scientifically precious. Which, nice segue, is exactly why NASA is about to chase this shadow in a jet. Avery: So while millions look up One NASA team is going to look sideways at, uh, nearly 50,000ft. As the eclipse crosses today, a NASA WB57 high altitude jet will fly along the path and literally chase the Moon's shadow. Anna: Why fly it rather than just stand still like the rest of us? Avery: Because if you move with the shadow, you stretch out your totality from the ground.

6:21 You get a couple of minutes from that jet. Cruising at around 740 kilometres an hour, the team extends your view of totality to nearly three. In the nose cone sit four cameras, visible and infrared, shooting at least 20 frames a second. The instrument's got a great name. Sci fi, scientifically calibrated in flight imagery Anna: and the science thereafter. Avery: The corona's biggest riddles. One, how the corona gets heated to something like a million degrees when the surface below it is a mere 5,500 thousand.

6:57 Two, how those great looping prominences form and hang suspended above the sun. And three, how material in the corona feeds into the solar wind that washes over all of us. The printable investigator is Amir Caspi at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. And his line is lovely. The sun is always changing. Every eclipse is different. So we might see something we've never seen before. Anna: And a, uh, total eclipse gives them something no spacecraft can. Avery: Right, exactly. And this is the clever bit.

7:28 Space telescopes block the sun's disc with a little occulting disc called a coronagraph. But that also hides the inner corona closest to the surface, the very region where the heating happens. A, uh, real eclipse with the moon as a perfect occulture hands you that inner corona for free, frying above the clouds. And most of the water vapour also opens up infrared wavelengths you can't get from the ground. These same cameras flew the 2024 eclipse over North America. The team fixed some overexposed frames and sped up the Software so the 2026 data should come back sharper and faster.

8:05 Anna: And it's not just the jet, there's a whole balloon army. Avery: There is the NASA supported nationwide Eclipse Balloon Beijing project led by Angela Dejardins at Montana State University is sending students from US Icelandic and Spanish universities to launch scientific balloons, around 86 of them from Iceland and Spain. Before, during and after the eclipse. They're measuring what happens to the atmosphere when day suddenly turns to dusk. The ozone and the so called boundary layer near the ground that shifts with temperature and moisture.

8:41 As NASA's Eclipse Programme Manager Kelly Couric put it, an eclipse gives us a vantage point on the sun we can't get anywhere else in the solar system. And today, students get to grab it. Anna: From the Sun's outer atmosphere to the birth of a star entirely. And a 30 year old mystery just got solved. Using the Alma array in Chile, astronomers have captured the first direct high resolution image of a magnetic field wrapped tightly around the jet streaming out of a still forming star. Avery: Paint the picture.

9:13 What does it actually look like? Anna: Picture a twisted funnel shaped field, a corkscrew of magnetism sheathing the gas that's blasting away from the young star. The target is a mouthful. NGC 1333 IRS 4A, a young double star system tucked inside the Perseus molecular cloud about 960 light years away. And seeing that field wound around the outflow confirms a prediction theorists have been making for decades about how these jets are launched and shaped. Avery: Why does a baby star even need a jet?

9:48 Anna: Beautiful question. It's a survival trick. As a star gathers material, it also gathers spin. Too much spin and it would tear itself apart before it ever finished forming. The magnetic field and the jet act like a release valve M they carry away excess material and angular momentum so the star can keep growing rather than spinning itself to pieces. This image shows the mechanism doing its job. Avery: And there's a bigger echo here, isn't there? Anna: There is, and this is the part I love. The same basic physics.

10:19 A magnetic field channelling a jet is thought to play out at wildly different scales across the universe. From a newborn star like this one, all the way up to supermassive black holes that fire jets across entire galaxies. Same trick, unimaginably different sizes. The work is led by Tao Chung Ching, a former Jansky Fellow at the US National Radio Observatory. Published in Nature Communications and a small point of pride for our part of the sky. ALMA sits high in the Atacama in Chile, very much a Southern Hemisphere machine.

10:53 Avery: Here's a question that sounds simple and absolutely isn't. Why did Venus, Earth's twin in size, turn into a furnace while Earth stayed livable? A planetary scientist at UC Riverside, Stephen Kane, thinks a big part of the answer might be something we routinely overlook. How fast a planet spins then really, Anna: why would rotation decide whether a world is hospitable? Avery: Because rotation sets how a star's heat gets spread around a planet. It shapes the winds, the weather, the way an atmosphere and any ocean circulate.

11:25 Earth's roughly 24 hour day keeps the energy moving and the climate regulated. Spin a world down slow enough, Kane argues, and you may tip it toward a runaway greenhouse. Heat pours in, can't escape, and you end up with Venus, a uh, crushing atmosphere and a surface hot enough to melt lead. Anna: So to test that on other planets, we just measure how fast they spin. Avery: That's the rub. It's genuinely hard. In a paper accepted by the Astronomical Journal, Kane warns that when you look at a distant planet, the motion you detect might be its howling winds, not the solid body underneath.

11:59 Exactly the confusion Venus throws at us. The proposed fix is to observe at several wavelengths that probe different depths of the atmosphere and separate the true spin from the wind. Anna: And there's a mission coming that could actually run this experiment at scale. Avery: There is ESA's Plato, due to launch in March 2027. It's built to find and monitor lots of planets. And Cain reckons it could turn up hundreds of Venus like worlds if they're all slow rotators. That's a strong hint that spin really is a switch between a living world and a hellish one.

12:31 If they're all over the place, we look elsewhere. Either way, a uh, lovely testable idea. Anna: And the sky isn't done with us today. Tonight, the night of the 12th into the 13th, the Perseid meteor shower hits its peak. And here's the gift. It's genuinely moonless because the same new moon that's giving the north its eclipse leaves our meteor sky pitch dark. These are the best Perseid conditions in years. Best window between midnight and dawn. And best of all in the pre dawn hours of the 13th when the radiant up in Perseus climbs highest.

13:06 For the northern hemisphere, North America especially, this is your night. Get away from town lights, look up after midnight. Give your eyes 20 minutes and let them wander. No telescope, no glasses, just a dark sky and patience. Avery: And um, for those of us down south where Perseus barely gets off the Anna: floor, for Cygny and the southern hemisphere, the Perseus radiant only just scrapes the northern horizon, so you'll catch a trickle at best. Don't fret. The evening sky pays you back right after sunset.

13:41 Venus is blazing low in the west, magnitude minus 4.4, impossible to miss and just past its half lit dichotomy phase. If you've a telescope then before dawn there's a fine lineup of planets strung across the eastern sky. And Comet 10P Tempel 2 is still a southern hemisphere favoured binocular Target 1 for our part of the world. Avery: And um, the eclipse times one more time for everyone. Anna: For North America it's an afternoon. Partial Boston peaking about 1:55, New York about 1:54 Eastern Time.

14:20 Glasses on throughout. For Australia and the wider southern hemisphere it's the live streams roughly half 1 to 6 in the morning AEST Thursday with totality around 3 to half 4am M Thursday. And that brings us to the line we never never look at a partly eclipsed sun without proper protection. Use eclipse glasses or a handheld solar viewer that meet the ISO 123122 standard. Ordinary sunglasses are not safe and neither is an unfiltered camera phone, binocular or telescope. If you're in the path of totality, you may look with the naked eye only during those brief seconds when the sun is complet completely covered and glasses go straight back on the instant the bright edge returns not in the path, then it's a partial the whole time.

15:16 Protection stays on from start to finish. Avery: Whatever you catch today a uh, partial, a stream or the meteors tonight, tell us about it. Everything lives at astronomydaily IO the back catalogue, the daily news feed, the newsletter, and a spot to leave a review or drop us a line. We're at Astral AstroDailyPod Pod everywhere. Anna: We'll be back tomorrow to tell you how Shadow Day went, the images, the science, and whatever the sun decided to show us. Until then, from Avery and from Anna. Avery: Enjoy the eclipse.

15:50 Anna: Mind your eyes and clear skies.