UK & Europe Solar Eclipse 2026: Everything You Need to Know

On the evening of 12 August, the Moon passes in front of the Sun and Europe gets its first total solar eclipse since 1999. If you're in the UK you'll see a very deep partial eclipse, the best since 2015. If you're in northern Spain or western Iceland, you get the real thing. WARNING: Do not stare directly at the sun. Make sure to get ISO 12312-2 certified solar eclipse glasses.

And then, a few hours later, the Perseid meteor shower peaks in a moonless sky. More on that at the end, because it turns Wednesday into the best observing night of the decade.

Here's where to be, when to look, and the one part you cannot afford to get wrong.

The Moon orbits Earth at roughly the right distance that, from where we stand, it appears almost exactly the same size as the Sun. Occasionally the three line up and the Moon's shadow falls on us.

That shadow has two parts. The dark inner core, only about 290km wide as it crosses Spain, is where the Sun disappears completely. That's totality. Around it is a much wider, fainter shadow where the Sun is only partly covered, and that one stretches across nearly all of Europe.

Which part you're standing in changes everything, including the safety rules. NASA's visualisation shows the path clearly.

You are outside the path of totality. What you get is a deep partial, and the further southwest you are, the more of the Sun disappears. Times and coverage below are from BBC Sky at Night Magazine, all in BST.

The Royal Observatory Greenwich puts London's maximum a minute earlier at 19:12. Either way, be outside and set up by quarter to seven.

The extremes. Deepest in the country is Bishop Rock Lighthouse in the Isles of Scilly at 96.5%. Land's End gets 95.8%, Lizard Point 95.6%. At the other end, SaxaVord Spaceport on Unst in Shetland sees 87.9%, which is a fitting way for the UK's northernmost launch site to come last. Everywhere between those two points sees more than 87% of the Sun covered, which is why there's very little reason to travel across the country for this. Travelling ten miles for a better horizon is a much better use of your evening.

In Ireland, Dublin gets around 94% and Cork around 96%.

Not your city. Your horizon.

Maximum eclipse happens between about 19:05 and 19:13 with the Sun already low in the west-northwest, and how low depends on where you are.

Three practical consequences:

Go where you'd go to watch a sunset. If you already have a spot for sunsets or for catching Venus low in the evening, that's your eclipse spot. West-facing coast, a hill, a seafront, an open park with nothing tall to the west-northwest. In the southwest you get the deepest eclipse and a sea horizon at the same time, which is the best combination available in Britain.

Check it tonight or tomorrow. Stand where you plan to stand, at around seven in the evening, and confirm you can actually see the Sun. Doing this on Wednesday at 19:00 is too late to fix. Make sure to be ready with your ISO 12312-2 certified solar eclipse glasses.

Distant cloud matters more than local cloud. This is the counterintuitive one. Because the Sun is so low, you're looking through a long slice of atmosphere, so cloud sitting hundreds of miles away over the Irish Sea or the Atlantic can block your view even when the sky directly overhead is completely clear. A clear forecast for your postcode is not the same as a clear line of sight.

One honest warning about what you'll see. No corona. The sky will not go dark and the streetlights will not come on. At 91% covered, the remaining sliver of Sun is still ferociously bright. What you get is a strange flat quality to the light, unusually sharp shadows, a noticeable drop in temperature, and a Sun shaped like a downturned frown, with the horns pointing down. It's genuinely eerie. It is not totality, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

Northern Spain is the main event, and the BBC's guide is a good plain-English starting point. Totality arrives around 20:28 to 20:31 local time (CEST), right before sunset.

The trade-off is weather. The Asturias and Basque coast averages around 60% cloud in August. The Ebro valley inland is often below 30%. Chasing the longest totality can mean chasing the worst odds of seeing it. Spain's official tourism site has regional detail.

Western Iceland catches totality in the late afternoon, with Reykjavík getting roughly a minute. The longest totality anywhere, 2 minutes 18 seconds, falls in open ocean off the Icelandic coast where almost nobody will be. timeanddate has exact local times for any location.

Elsewhere in Europe, it's a partial: around 92% in Paris, 84% in Berlin, and 88 to 95% across France, Belgium, Switzerland and northern Italy.

Read this bit twice.

In the UK, there is no moment when it is safe to look without protection. None. Because you never get totality, the Sun is never fully covered, and even a 3.5% sliver will damage your retina. In Spain and Iceland, glasses come off only during the seconds of totality itself, and go straight back on the instant the Sun reappears.

Sunglasses do not work. Neither do welding masks below shade 12, exposed camera film, smoked glass, CDs, or stacked sunglasses. Proper eclipse glasses block around 100,000 times more light than sunglasses. Your retina has no pain receptors, so damage happens silently and you notice hours later, and it is permanent.

The low Sun is a trap. Because this eclipse happens close to sunset, the Sun will look soft and orange and comfortable to stare at. The visible glare drops but the infrared does not. Comfortable does not mean safe.

Never look through a camera, phone, binoculars or telescope while wearing eclipse glasses. The optics concentrate the light and burn through the filter instantly. Optical equipment needs its own solar filter fitted to the front.

What you're looking for is the marking ISO 12312-2 on the arm of the glasses, plus the manufacturer's name and full address, which the standard requires. I recommend the official ORRO 37mm Solar Eclipse Glasses.

If you're ordering on Amazon, search for ISO 12312-2 eclipse glasses, then check the brand against the AAS list before you buy, and skip the cheapest no-name listings. Sold by the brand, not by a marketplace seller you've never heard of. At two days' notice, a high street optician, science museum or planetarium shop is often the safer bet.

No glasses? Use a pinhole. Punch a small hole in card, stand with your back to the Sun, and let the light fall onto a second piece of card. You'll see a crescent projected. It works perfectly, it costs nothing, and it's completely safe because you're never looking up. The Exploratorium has a how-to. A colander does the same job and throws dozens of crescents at once. So, for that matter, does the gap between leaves on a tree.

It's Britain in August, so plan for it. Long-term statistics suggest nowhere in the country has much better than about a 30% chance of clear skies in mid-August.

The good news is that a partial eclipse is forgiving in a way totality isn't. The whole thing lasts nearly two hours, so you don't need one perfect moment, just a gap in the cloud somewhere in that window. Odds of catching something are decent even on a poor day.

The Royal Observatory Greenwich and timeanddate are both streaming live from the path of totality, so you'll see the corona regardless. Check the Met Office forecast on Wednesday morning, and if you can drive an hour toward better sky, do it. Eclipse chasers move on the day for a reason.

Here's the part almost nobody has noticed. The Perseid meteor shower peaks on the night of 12 to 13 August, the same night.

A solar eclipse only happens at new moon, which means that once the Sun goes down on Wednesday there is effectively no Moon in the sky at all. Perseids in a completely dark sky is the best possible version of that shower, and it's pure coincidence that it lands on eclipse night.

Under ideal conditions the Perseids produce up to 100 meteors an hour. From a reasonably dark UK site, expect 20 to 40. Best after midnight, when your side of the planet rotates into the debris stream. Just lie back and look at as much sky as you can. If you can get away from streetlights after the eclipse, do. To enhance the experience you can always grab these Celestron 71009 SkyMaster binoculars that will help see the colours in all its might.

Venus also reaches its half-lit phase on Wednesday, so if you have binoculars, that's a third thing.

The next total solar eclipse visible from British soil is 23 September 2090, when the south and southwest coast gets up to 2 minutes 37 seconds of totality. The next one in Spain is next August, and it's a long one.

So on Wednesday evening, go outside.

Ricky

The OuterSpark

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