2026 Solar Eclipse - Today!

2026 Solar Eclipse - Today!

For those in North America seeing a partial eclipse, it will be most full in Toronto at 1:40 p.m. and New York City at 1:54 p.m. local time. In Fairbanks, you will need to get up early to see its fullest point at 8:27 a.m. local time.
How do I watch the eclipse in person?

If you are lucky enough to be in one of the locations where the solar eclipse reaches totality, it will last for about two minutes.

You will need to wear solar eclipse glasses to safely view the sun during the event to protect your retinas from damage. You can take your glasses off for that two minutes when it's at totality.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/total-solar-eclipse-august-12-2026/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

We might sneak off to see if we can find a good place to view it.

One of the dragons and the raven are coming with us.

Meanwhile six dragons have disappeared without trace. I wonder what they're up to...

No photos?

Denied!

Apparently we're going to get about 90% eclipse here, Which would be good if we didn't have about 100% cloud cover too!

Darn, it’s all cloudy! Something felt rather weird.

It's happening...

Experimenting with pin holes...

Well we definitely got quite gloomy for a bit, but I couldn't tell where the sun was, let alone see it!

An impromptu eclipse watch party assembled in our street as we approached maximality (c. 91%).

Pretty impressive...

Well done - we all survived and it didn't trigger an earthquake!

Theoretically, we might have seen a partial, except that when it was due, it was pouring rain.

However, if the sky clears and if I happen to wake up at 3 am, I'm told that should be a good time for the Perseid Meteor shower.

This is the rather crappy video I grabbed on my phone, which does NOT do the experience justice as it automatically compensated for the changing light, and the bright ring around moon is shown as far too bright and wide. The 'diamond ring' photo I posted was one of Austin's, taken at the same time, and was far more representative of what it was actually like at totality. I think I missed the bit where my son declared that it looked 'creepy as f**k'.

I guess everyone responds differently, but what I do love about this video is the squeals of delight from children whose parents had brought them to the same bit of mountain as us to watch the experience.



There will be more photos, but the good ones are mostly on Austin's camera and we were late back and he's working this morning so he hasn't gone through them and sent them to me yet...

Edit to add that six of my dragons are still missing. Has anybody seen them? I suspect they are flying around up there somewhere, possibly in formation...

Burra Maluca wrote:Experimenting with pin holes...

Okay, I am very late to the party. But I saw the (partial) eclipse from a nice spot, not too far away. Most of the time I used the 'pinhole' method. A few times I looked at the real sun-moon, but through two layers of black old-fashioned negative strips, and just for a moment. Those black negatives work exactly like special eclips-glasses. You can not see anything through it, except for the sun (which looks orangey).

While I was there watching, I saw some people walking in my direction. When they came closer I saw it was a couple I knew, with their son. The had a shoe-box-construction with pinhole. My two loose sheets of paper worked better. And they borrowed my black negatives to have a better look.

As far as I know this was third solar eclipse I saw. I did see the total eclipse of 1999 from Le Havre in France (I went camping there with my youngest son just to see it). And one other partial one, probably in 1976.

If you can see them, they are amazing!  My house got bullseyed by two in 7 years!  Absolutely jaw-dropping!  The last on lasted about 4 minutes.

I might have to post my video of the skyline going dark.



Eric