Dispatches on eclipses and dark skies

This site published a climatological probability, not a forecast. Now that the ERA5 archive covers 12 August 2026 itself, we can download the real cloud cover for all 404 cells of the band and set it beside what we said — without ducking.

The astronomy is fixed and the weather is a gamble, but the part you fully control is where you are standing and when you got there. A plan for 12 August, a date that lands in the middle of Spain's busiest travel month.

Spain gets three major solar eclipses in three consecutive years. The 2027 total lands in the far south with the Sun high and totality almost five minutes long; the 2028 annular crosses the whole country at dusk. Here is how they compare — and why 2026 is the dress rehearsal for both.

Your eyes and your camera need separate protection, and the fact that this eclipse happens with the Sun almost on the horizon changes both the framing and the rehearsal. A practical guide that ends with the least popular piece of advice: put the camera down.

A total eclipse is not an instant, it is a sequence — and almost all of it happens before the Sun disappears. Here is the order in which the light, the temperature, the animals and the sky itself give way, and what the low Sun of 12 August 2026 changes about it.

Being inside the official totality band isn't enough. In 85 towns the terrain itself blocks the view — the west-facing horizon sits higher than the sun ever climbs on eclipse evening.

Certified ISO 12312-2 glasses, at all times except the exact seconds of totality inside the band. The rules are simple — what changes town to town is how short that unprotected window actually is.

The project's own dataset rounds Madrid and Barcelona's eclipse magnitude to a flat 1 — and still marks both cities as non-total. That gap between what the number shows and what the flag says is the whole story.

Most total solar eclipses happen with the Sun high in the sky. This one doesn't. A Sun sitting between 2° and 12° above the horizon changes the geometry, the colour and — in several cities — even when the eclipse is allowed to end.

The eclipse happens at sunset, so clouds to the west matter as much as standing inside the band. Thirty 12ths of August of ERA5 reanalysis (1996–2025) draw a sharp line across Spain.

Our scoring model blends duration, horizon clearance and thirty years of climate into a single number. Here's the actual top 20 out of 3,963 towns — and the formula behind the ranking, reproduced in the open.