Europe is about to see its first total solar eclipse in nearly three decades. Later today, the moon's shadow will race across the Arctic Ocean, northeastern Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain, plunging a narrow corridor of the continent into daytime darkness for the first time since 1999.
Totality is set to begin around 4:58 p.m. UTC over the Arctic Ocean and end near 6:34 p.m. UTC in the Atlantic, sweeping east across roughly four and a half hours of partial phases on either side. The longest totality, about 2 minutes 18 seconds, falls near Iceland's Snæfellsnes peninsula and Reykjavik around 5:46 p.m. UTC. In Spain, where the path of totality crosses the Iberian Peninsula west to east through provincial capitals including León, Bilbao, Zaragoza and Valencia, totality arrives around 6:27 p.m. UTC and lasts up to 110 seconds, with the sun sitting low near the western horizon — a "sunset eclipse." A partial eclipse will be visible across parts of the northern United States, most of Canada, much of Europe and northwestern Africa, though no location in the U.S. will see totality.
Scientists chasing the shadow
Research teams are converging on Spain and Iceland to use the brief window of totality to study the sun's corona, the wispy outer atmosphere that is normally washed out by the sun's glare and visible from the ground only during a total eclipse. NASA-funded scientists plan to fly instrumented aircraft into the path, while ground teams in Spain will launch balloons carrying 360-degree cameras and ozone-monitoring instruments, and researchers will operate observing sites in both Iceland and Spain to hedge against cloud cover. The European Space Agency has also been modeling the eclipse in advance to calibrate its space-weather instruments.
The central question researchers hope to chip away at is why the corona burns at roughly a million degrees, far hotter than the sun's visible surface beneath it, and how the sun's magnetic field ferries that energy outward. Spectrometers and filtered high-resolution cameras aimed at the corona during totality can reveal which elements are present and their ionization states, data that feeds directly into forecasting the solar wind and the space weather that can disrupt satellites and power grids on Earth.
Today's sky offers extra incentive for stargazers even beyond the eclipse. A six-planet alignment — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune strung across the eastern sky — is visible in the pre-dawn hours, and the Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight under a moonless sky, with dark-sky observers potentially seeing up to 100 meteors an hour.
Because UBStandard's morning edition publishes hours before totality begins, today's eclipse has not yet occurred as this is written. Weather permitting across Iceland and northern Spain, the corona observations, along with photographs and video of totality, are expected to follow throughout the afternoon and evening in Europe. The next total solar eclipse to cross mainland Europe is not due until 2027, when the path runs through southern Spain and North Africa.
