Piers & Eclipses
Wednesday. More gorgeous sunny weather, which lasted the whole day; perfect for the solar eclipse in the evening. Vanessa set off for Italy with Ed and Tara, driving to Sutton to collect Ed before taking a taxi to Gatwick for their easyJet flight to Venice at around six. They will be away for about a week.
Dash and I drove to Minnis Bay, reasoning that the north Kent coast would give us a clear western horizon, with the sun eventually setting over the sea. That was the theory. First contact was at 18:18, with maximum partial eclipse at 19:13, when a little over 90 per cent of the sun was hidden. It was certainly low in the sky, but still far too bright for the sort of photographs I had imagined.
As maximum eclipse approached, there was a visible darkening across the landscape — but nothing at all like nightfall. It was subtle and rather strange; our visual processing systems began quietly reporting that something did not add up. The light no longer agreed with the position of the sun or with the crisp shadows cast across the seafront. Not darkness, exactly. Just less daylight than there should have been.
We were certainly not ‘plunged into darkness’, as some of the cheaper local news coverage would have it. Minnis Bay was packed for a few minutes, with the available parking overwhelmed and cars abandoned halfway across pavements while maximum eclipse came and went. Then it was over. The spectators dispersed almost as quickly as they had arrived, leaving behind the usual seafront and a faint impression that a flash mob had assembled to watch somebody turn down the Sun.
There was not much to show for it photographically, but by then I was geared up and in the mood to carry on. I dropped Dash at home and went out again for some blue-hour photography in Herne Bay, followed by fish and chips and coffee. The eclipse was less of a spectacle than advertised, but it had provided a good excuse to spend the evening beside the sea.
A short note about the eclipse
Although it appeared as a partial eclipse from Britain, the event of 12 August 2026 was a total solar eclipse. A solar eclipse occurs at new Moon, when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun closely enough for their discs to overlap. The Moon’s small, dark central shadow, the umbra, produces totality wherever it touches the Earth; the much broader penumbra surrounds it, giving everyone else a partial eclipse. The difference between the two can amount to only a few kilometres on the ground, but visually it is the difference between an oddly diminished afternoon and the Sun disappearing altogether.
The path of totality began in a remote part of northern Russia before crossing the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, western Iceland and the North Atlantic. It then reached northern Spain, briefly clipped the north-eastern corner of Portugal, and ended around sunset on Spain’s Mediterranean coast and the Balearic Islands. A partial eclipse was visible across most of Europe and Canada, north-western Africa and parts of the northern United States, although the amount of Sun covered varied enormously across that considerable area (science.nasa).
The greatest eclipse occurred over the North Atlantic, west of Iceland, where the Moon’s shadow was about 294 kilometres wide. Totality there lasted 2 minutes and 18 seconds, with the Sun roughly 26 degrees above the horizon. Elsewhere it was generally shorter: Reykjavík had just over a minute, while observers in northern Spain saw the Sun vanish for around a minute and a half, very low in the evening sky (NASA eclipse calculations).
Spain was particularly well placed, although the timing made observation awkward. In cities such as León and Zaragoza, totality occurred at around 20:30 local time, shortly before sunset. Madrid and Barcelona lay just outside the central shadow and saw about 99 per cent of the Sun covered, proving again that even a very deep partial eclipse is not quite the same event. The remaining sliver of photosphere is still intensely bright, whereas inside the path of totality it disappears and the much fainter solar corona becomes visible.
This eclipse was the 48th member of Saros 126, a family of 72 related eclipses separated by intervals of approximately 18 years and 11 days. The previous member crossed the Arctic, Russia and China on 1 August 2008; the next will occur on 23 August 2044 over North America. The repeating pattern arises because the Moon, Earth and Sun return to almost the same relative geometry after 223 lunar months, although the extra fraction of a day shifts each successive eclipse roughly a third of the way around the world.
