Overview
- The total solar eclipse occurred on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026, with a narrow path of totality running from northern Russia through Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain and clipping a corner of Portugal.
- Orbital sensors including NASA’s DSCOVR/EPIC, EUMETSAT’s Meteosat series and NOAA’s GOES recorded time‑lapse sequences that show the Moon’s umbra as a small dark spot moving quickly across the planet.
- Totality was brief and confined, lasting up to about 2 minutes 18 seconds in the center of the path, with the Moon’s umbra roughly 180 miles (290 km) wide and the shadow racing across Earth at speeds above 1,000 mph.
- Photographers on the ground and drones produced widely shared imagery, highlighted by Lucie McCormick’s 4K drone time-lapse from central Spain and a viral photograph of skateboarder Danny León timed with the eclipsed Sun.
- A striking NASA photo of the International Space Station transiting the partially eclipsed Sun was taken by Joel Kowsky, and scientific teams are now cataloguing these multi‑platform datasets for coronal, prominence and atmospheric analysis.