Europe Will Get Its First Total Solar Eclipse in Over 25 Years. Here's What You Should Know

Just for the record, a celestial dragon will not eat the sun on Aug. 12, 2026. Nor will a mythic wolf named Sköll chase the sun through the sky, catching it and biting it. And nor will the sun be swallowed by a giant squirrel. But don’t tell that to the long-ago Chinese, Norse, or Choctaw people respectively, who believed that that’s what was happening during the course of a total solar eclipse. Now we know better, but if we don’t look at solar eclipses with the same fear or fables that the ancients did, we still regard them with a combination of wonder, delight, and appreciation for the movement of the cosmic clockworks. The eclipse that will begin in the Arctic, over northern Russia at 7:54 p.m. local time on Aug. 12 and pass over and down through Greenland, Iceland, Spain, and the Mediterranean Sea—nipping the northeast corner of Portugal on the way—will be no different. And it will be the first total solar eclipse to pass over central Europe since 1999.Total solar eclipses—when the disk of the moon entirely blocks the disk of the sun—are uncommon events. On average, one will occur somewhere on the globe only once every 18 months. At any particular spot on Earth an eclipse will ...