Write down these dates because, I assure you, when the time comes they will want to be at the right time and place to watch the show. After more than a hundred years without witnessing an event of this type, Spain is entering a season of solar eclipses. There will be five in the next six years: two total, two partial and one annular. The most spectacular will be seen on August 12, 2026. It will be the first total eclipse to be seen in these latitudes of the globe in more than a hundred years.
This spectacular astronomical event, in which the king star will disappear behind the silhouette of the Moon for a few minutes, will come with a catch. It can only be witnessed in all its splendor from some points on the peninsula. Tarragona will see it, but not Barcelona. It will reach Zaragoza, Valencia, Valladolid, Oviedo and Palma but not Madrid, Seville or Tenerife. Hence, if you want to be cautious, it is better to organize your agenda with time to eclipse season.
The day has come, the Sun will follow the following path. In fact, to get ready, the best thing would be to look for a viewpoint that points to the northwest. At 7:35 p.m., as Earthlings will be able to see, the Moon will touch the edge of the Sun. first phase of the eclipse. At 20:29, the Earth’s satellite will completely block out the Sun’s light and for a few minutes it will be night. Then the moon silhouette will move to the other side. From Spain, the show will be seen until 20:54. From this time on, the sunset at these latitudes of the planet will hide the eclipse for the Spanish. In other parts of the globe, the eclipse will continue until 9:20 p.m. That time, officially, the path of the Moon and the Sun will separate definitively.
The last time that Spain witnessed something like this was the August 30, 1905. To observe the eclipse in all its splendor we will have to move towards the ‘lucky strip’ from where you will see how the Moon manages to completely cover the Sun. From there you will experience a total eclipse (as Bonnie Tyler would say). In cities like Barcelona, Madrid, Córdoba, Seville, Pontevedra or Salamanca, which are excluded from the lucky zone, the astronomical event of August 12, 2026 will be experienced as a partial eclipse. At the height of the eclipse it will not be at night, but it will be seen how the Moon ‘bites’ a piece of the Sun.
eclipse season
The total eclipse of August 12, 2026 will be the first of its kind in more than a hundred years. But in order not to arrive at the event untrained, in the previous years there will be other eclipses to warm up engines. The October 25, 2022 and the March 29, 2025 Europe will live two partial solar eclipses. The first (which will reach its peak around 1:00 p.m.) will only be visible from the northeast of the peninsula. From Barcelona, for example, you will only see how the Moon hides a small portion of the Sun. It will be flashy, but not so spectacularr. The second (which will leave its most iconic image around 11:47) will be seen from all over the country. In this case, as in 2022, from Spain it is also expected that at the peak of the event only a ‘bite’ of the Sun will be seen.
The solar show will go further in the following years. The August 12, 2026 we will have, as we have already said at the beginning of this Time.news, the first total eclipse of the last century and a year later, the August 2, 2027, the event will be repeated. The one from 2027 will leave the photo of the day at 12:06. Before closing the chapter on total eclipses in Spain, one more point. The October 2, 1959, the Canary Islands witnessed a total eclipse of three minutes. That day, with all the more reason, the archipelago earned the name of “lucky islands”.
On January 26, 2028finally, Spain will also be able to see an annular solar eclipse in which, at its peak, the Moon will cover the Sun, leaving its around a ring of light. Save this date because the photographs left by annular eclipses are always the most spectacular. In this case, in addition, the event will start around 4:40 p.m. and will end after sunset, around 5:55 p.m. The print, then, can be spectacular. The The last time Spain witnessed something like this was on April 17, 1912.. Although, yes, according to the chronicles of the moment, the apogee barely lasted a second and “it happened with more pain than glory.”
On the eve of the start of the eclipse season, here goes one last curiosity worth mentioning. Solar eclipses are that they never come alone. Two weeks before or two weeks after the solar shows can also be observed eclipses lunares. Lunar eclipses can be observed in Spain in November 2022, May and October 2023, March and September 2024, March and September 2025, August 2026, February 2027, January, July and December 2028. The calendar is intense, yes , but rest assured that in these pages we will notify you when the dates are approaching.
voyage through the sun
The eclipse season will be the clearest opportunity that we earthlings will have to travel to the Sun. If only for the views. But since we are in vacation time, can you imagine being able to actually travel to the Sun? To give you an idea of the magnitude of the odyssey, here is a fact. The light emitted by the sun takes a little longer than eight minutes in touring the 150 million kilometers that separate the star from our planet. If you are reading these lines during the day, and you are lucky enough to be in a place with natural lighting, think that the light you are seeing has traveled through space 300,000 kilometers per hour to get to you.
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Traveling to the Sun is, technically, impossible for earthlings. And not only because of the investment of time that it would take to reach the king star. There are also drawbacks, such as the huge amount of radiation to which a would-be space traveler would be exposed. And of course, the high temperatures that he would have to endure. The closest our species has come to ‘touching’ the star It was on December 15, 2021, when the ‘Solar Parker’ space mission managed to enter the Sun’s atmosphere. Even so, the probe it only stayed on the solar perimeter for a handful of hours. Then, he went back to a safe distance to continue his observations.
Approaching a ball of hydrogen and helium of over 4.5 billion years is not easy. Although, everything is said, the reality is that nothing could live in the sun and, in turn, without the light radiating from this star most life on earth would not exist. For that matter, we also know that the fury of the Sun (via solar storms) can lead to catastrophic events in the blue marble (but that, for now alone, is only posed as a long and distant possibility). So for now, it’s best to watch the sky swings from a distance. Travel to the Sun through the eclipse season.