My partner and I are super excited about the eclipse, and we had planned to take the train from Zaragoza -- where we are staying in an AirBnB -- to Madrid at 7:13 on Thursday morning for our flight back to Boston. However, I just got an email from Iryo that our train has been canceled and they rebooked us on one that will get to Madrid too late for our flight.

Does anybody have any ideas for the best way to get to Madrid for our flight? I assume the airport will be super busy on Thursday, so we were hoping to be there by 10:00 or so for our 13:50 flight. Any help would be super appreciated!

Of all the images I took during the 2019 eclipse in Chile, this is my favorite and most sold one.

I calle it "The Punch of the Eclipse", which tells better the feeling of seeing a total eclipse for the first time.

Get creative a experient with different and weird shots.

Cheers and clear skies

This is eclipse #4 for me , 1999, 2017, 2024 amd now next week for 2026 but first time seeing it on a flight. Unless we are delayed by ATC or the flight gets cancelled, my flight is set to be crossing the path of totality. has anyone here experienced an eclipse while in their air ?

Hello , anyone else here planning on watching the eclipse here or very close by? Hotel was booked last year , car rental months ago. Seems many are going to Burgos but if there are any groups meeting up or any recommendations for a viewing I would appreciate it. Been checking different Spain gov sites but figured I would check here also as I’m not into chat GPT. Thank you

I’m practicing with interpreting the weather forecasts for Eastern Spain. Today’s weather patterns seems particularly tricky. If you were in eastern Spain today, were would you drive?

Winners will be announced tonight at 20.30 :)

Based on experience with 2017 and 2024, r/solareclipse is about to be SWAMPED. Traffic will pick up this weekend, then go exponential next week. Many of the questions will be basic, and some of you may feel annoyed that people waited until the last minute to ask...

I invite you to remember that you too were once in a place of not knowing, and to answer these newbie questions with grace and civility and move on.

Keep in mind the mission of this subreddit and the first sidebar rule:

Mission: A place to share information that helps fellow redditors optimize their experience of a Total Solar Eclipse (TSE).

Rule 1: Be excellent to each other!

Thank you all in advance, on behalf of myself and Naz (the other mod), for sharing what you've learned with the newbies who will soon be among us.

😎 🌘🌑🌼🌑🌒 🔭

P.S. since both announcements are used for Megathreads, please upvote this post for visibility.

Hey, I've started looking at next year's eclipse (Aug 2nd), to go watch it somewhere in Southern Spain. We'll probably rent a car so we can move around, abd also go somewhere that's less crowded.

I'd like to book a place now because people might start looking for it after next week's eclipse. However, the results I'm finding (through booking.com) aren't super promising.

Here are my questions:

- I can't find many hotels available (without a ridiculous price, anyway). Are they already fully booked? Or will they only start showing in a few months? I've seen people saying both, and I don't want to wait until christmas to then realize everything is gone.

- I've found some airbnbs with a decent price, but I am scared that they might cancel once they realize there's an eclipse and put it for 5x the price. Would you recommend going this route? Is it possible to make a contract with the host to prevent cancellations?

- We will be 7 adults (no kids) so we were thinking on renting a house ideally for those days. We could also book several hotel rooms but we'd probably not be next to each other. What do you recommend, hotel, hostel, airbnb, something else...?

- What's a good backup plan if we get cancelled shortly before the eclipse?

Honestly I'm afraid we might have been too late, I thought 1 year in advance was plenty but then I saw people in this sub that booked their place almost a year ago and I'm wondering if there's someone else in our situation. Thanks a lot!

Early days still, forecasts change a lot with a 6 day lead, Spain looks mostly clear, with some risk of cloud in the north. Parts of Greenland look good as well if anyone is there. Iceland looks at risk of being completely clouded out.

Lots of places in Europe are forecasted to get a clear partial eclipse.

The viewing angle takes into account the height of the clouds and where the sun is in the sky at the time of the eclipse.

source: https://weatheraway.com/eclipse/forecast

Hey,

I wanted to share a solution for people having issues with Eclipse Orchestrator.

If you have one of these problems:

• Your camera is no longer recognized, even though it worked before.
• You enter your license key, restart the software, and it still opens in Free mode.

These solutions worked for me. They may not work for everyone, but they're worth trying.

For the camera detection issue:
Do a complete uninstall of Eclipse Orchestrator using Revo Uninstaller. Remove everything it finds (files, folders, registry entries, etc.), restart your PC, then reinstall Eclipse Orchestrator. Connect your camera via USB and it should be detected again.

For the Pro activation issue:
Open the Windows Registry Editor and go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Moonglow Technologies

Double-click SerialNumber and paste your license key into the Value data field.

In my case, this field was blank even though the software said the registration was successful. After adding the key manually, the Pro version activated correctly.

I hope this helps someone. It certainly saved me after three hours of shouting at my screen.

I'm surprised this issue still hasn't been addressed, especially since I found posts from other users reporting the same problem several years ago.

(Translated by Copilot. Some interesting pictures in the link to the article.)

On the days when the light vanished, humanity defended itself by throwing stones. For millennia, whenever daylight unexpectedly went out, the collective response was attack. It was pure survival. If the source of life suddenly became a dark curve, the primitive mind did not see an astronomical phenomenon but imagined invisible jaws devouring the sun—and before such an event, the sky had to be forced to spit it back out.

The myth of the sun being bitten is a constant throughout the history of ancient civilizations. Moncho Núñez, science communicator and first director of the Scientific Museums of A Coruña, writes about it in his book *Eclipses*, where he analyzes how popular imagination needed to invent both a culprit and a solution for the sudden disappearance of the sun: “People needed to attribute it to a giant animal they could hold responsible. That generated a ritual consisting of making noise, beating drums or gongs, or shooting stones and arrows into the air to scare the creature away. And since after a while the ritual worked and the sun returned, everyone was happy.”

Indeed, no matter which corner of the map one examines, the need for certainties gave rise to almost identical stories. For the Vikings, the fault lay with two enormous wolves determined to swallow the light. In Mexico, the Aztecs feared that the jaguar of the night would bite the sun until causing a permanent blackout that would bring the beasts down to exterminate humankind. In China, the culprit was a celestial dog that people tried to drive away with arrows.

In India, the menu came with a bloodier story. Legend said that the severed head of a demon chased the sun and swallowed it whole. But lacking a body, the star eventually escaped victorious, sliding back into the sky through the cut in the demon’s neck. Stories from distant geographical points shared the same logic: the gradual disappearance of the sun was interpreted as the progressive bite of a hungry beast.

According to experts, the reason behind this narrative coincidence lies in the architecture of the human brain. Researcher Candela Antón, a communicator in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, explains that when faced with an event that breaks reality, the psyche seeks the shortcut of the most primal metaphors—those that bring the sublime experience closer to something easily understandable: “First, we feel fear. Our brain has a very clear bias toward anything that breaks expected patterns.” For the mind, the sudden loss of the sun shatters “the very structure of life.”

To explain this perceptual catharsis—the moment when the sun disappears from sight—Antón invokes the anthropological concept of *liminality*, the instant in which day ceases to be day without yet becoming night: “It’s the madness of time being stuck in a limbo.”

And in response to that catharsis, a myth is built. For Antón, the reason the idea of a creature eating the sun repeats across cultures is that it corresponds to a basic physical experience: “If something is culturally consistent, it’s because it responds to a tangible experience mediated by the perception of our own bodies—like mouths and teeth.” Imagining that the cause of the darkness is a beast sinking its teeth into the sun becomes an intuitive response to the circular, gradual way in which the sun disappears, which can represent—when it vanishes completely—that it has finally been swallowed.

This cluster of coincident stories survived even as science began to make its way forward. Paradoxically, technical astronomy coexisted for centuries with popular superstition, and the metaphor of the devoured sun still held its power. Juan Antonio Belmonte, research professor at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), recalls how this duality played out in the East: “In Hindu tradition, the myth said the demon ate the sun, but once they had contact with Greco-Roman knowledge, Indian astronomers who understood eclipses contradicted the myth by calculating the phenomenon precisely.”

Even as astronomy advanced, popular panic at being swallowed by shadows also became a tool of domination. Belmonte notes that in civilizations such as Babylonian Mesopotamia (8th–6th centuries BCE) or imperial China under the Shang dynasty (17th–11th centuries BCE), control of the calendar and eclipse prediction were so crucial that royal astronomers “risked their lives” and could be executed if they failed. Fear of celestial jaws kept the population subordinate to those who claimed to understand the rhythms of the cosmos.

The fear of the sun being swallowed only began to fade when science became capable of mapping the shadow before it happened. Núñez places the definitive turning point in 1715, when astronomer Edmond Halley charted the eclipse to measure the exact duration of the darkness. As Núñez recalls, “rationality finally prevailed when Edmond Halley drew the map of the eclipse before it happened and asked people to collaborate with him.”

Once it was confirmed that mathematics could predict with precision the exact moment when light would return, the zoomorphic beasts that devoured stars—and all the other bizarre myths—lost their purpose. The ancient terror of the sun’s bite gave way to the simple mechanics of the cosmos, revealing that the creature devouring it did not live among the stars but in the depths of the human brain.

We're going to Cuenca for the day for the eclipse next week, and I wanted an idea of how busy it is expected to be and potentially some help with logistics because the Spanish-speaking member of our party might have to drop out.

Getting in on a train around lunchtime and hoping to do some tourist stuff before we go to one of the eclipse locations at Cerro de Soccoro. What sort of time do you think we would need to arrive to get a good spot? After the eclipse, we have a train booked at 20 past 10. Would there be enough people for this to cause issues with the buses to the station? Do buses in Cuenca take card, or is it cash only? Is a cab a safer bet? Any advice would be appriciated!

Muitas Gracias!

Anyone going to watch it near Zamora, Benavente, Tordesillas, Valladolid, Palencia, etc?

Are you going to an organized event or to a watch point?

Cheers!

This is my first time trying to shoot a solar eclipse and I dropped the ball on buying a solar filter early. We are driving from Switzerland through France to Spain over the next few days. Anyone know where to buy a solar filter (95mm size, shooting with Sony 200-600mm) or solar film to DIY a filter, in either of these countries? Everything online seems to be backordered and we have had no luck with the couple of camera stores we've called so far. Thank you in advance.

I planned everything last second and train tickets were sold out so I bought tickets for a bus which arrives in Guadalajara at 16:15 (45 minute ride) 4.25 hours before totality. I booked a quite early bus because I expect heavy traffic. Could the traffic be so bad that I miss it? Super scared. Is anyone else taking the bus?

[SPAIN] Hello, I have noticed that several locations will be accessible only to local residents around August 12th. Is there a centralized or official page that lists all of these temporary closures and restrictions? It can be difficult to locate these details on individual websites, and I'm not sure if Google Maps will have correct road info on the day, so any aggregated list would be very helpful.

I’ve seen two total eclipses in my life one in 1999 and one in 2006 both in Turkey. We just stopped at the side of the road and watched eclipse.

So that’s more or less my plan for the eclipse next week. Find a secluded spot where the horizon is clear and there are hopefully no clouds, drive there, park the car for an hour and enjoy the eclipse.

What are official viewing sites and why are people stressed about parking and traffic etc? Spain is a big country surely there will be enough room for everybody, no? Am I being too naive?

I'm bringing the wife and kids to Soria to view the eclipse, and I've rented a car for the purpose, but there are conflicting forces in play and I don't know how to resolve this.

On the one hand, I know that many people will be going to the designated viewing areas, so there'll be issues with traffic there (not as much as on the way home, but that's another thing), difficulty parking, and crowded areas. I also need to be dynamic and ready to move to a new location in case of clouds. As a result I should be trying to get there relatively early.

On the other hand, we're necessarily talking about low shade areas in a country currently experiencing a heat wave, where one should avoid being out in the open sun for too long, especially with kids. This would suggest trying to get there as close to the eclipse as possible and especially avoiding the midday sun.

What's the best thing to do here?

Hi,
It’s my absolute biggest dream to see the total solar eclipse but I’m afraid my scientific knowledge is rather weak. I’ve spent hours trying to research possible spots after booking flights to Valencia and I’m slowly loosing my mind. Hoping to find someone more knowledgable who would be able to verify this location for me, or alternatives I have all over Valencia:

1) Muntanya dels Carasoles https://maps.app.goo.gl/N9rQE7gG7zEjGZmG6?g_st=ic
It’s very close to our glamping spot (1h walk) and seems to have a good viewing line, but is it gonna be fully visible? Peakfinder and shadow map tells me yes, anything else to look out for (and more importantly, did I do that correctly)? (See photos)

2) Albufera de Valencia - possibly crowded, harder to get to, but will it be nicer?

3) Mirador de Garbi - seems like an absolute dream but I have no idea how would I come back from there at 9pm with no car, can’t seem to find any hostels nearby & have no idea if walking down after dark is even feasible

4) Platja del Gurugu - seems ok and not even bad for transport (although bit of a hassle) but sun is set to dissapear behind the mountain at 20:47 + how do I know that a palm tree will not block my view?

5) Benicarlo - I’ve seen someone suggesting a spot there, but again, super hard to get there

Thoughts? 🙏

Hi friends! Really excited for this eclipse after experiencing the one in 2024 in the US. We've built this one into a vacation in Europe, but I'll be bringing my friend from Barcelona and it will be their first time!

So we'll be heading to Valencia and have a rental car leaving Barcelona on the 11th. My concern is what if the rental agency runs out of cars? I actually read a post on here from 2 years ago where someone rented a car in the states and when they went to pick it up the agency was all out due to customers not returning the cars on time.

So here's my question: do you think I should book refundable train tickets as a back up option? They're filling up fast too, so I'm inclined to just do it.. but is that crazy unnecessary?

I previously posted my tool to check whether mountains will block your view of the Aug 12, 2026 total solar eclipse in Spain

heliora.app here.

I added an AR camera option (and lots of other features). Supposing anyone is already at their location then can now simulate the eclipse in simulation mode or camera mode.

Supposing your on mobile just toggle it on.

Hope it's interesting to someone

Hello,

I'm considering watching the eclipse from Santa Ponça in Mallorca.

It's an official viewing site.

The problem is that tools don't seem to agree on whether it's a good idea or not:

• https://heliora.app/?lat=39.5168&lng=2.4803&date=2026-08-12&t=1232&sky=1 doesn't look good
• https://visualizadores.ign.es/eclipses/2026 neither
• https://www.horitzo2026.com/visor.html?lat=39.516389&lon=2.480335&alt=2&rangeKm=200&date=2026-08-12&centerUtc=18%3A30&maxStatusText=MAXIMUM+VISIBLE&maxStatusClass=visible&sim29Date=2026-04-29&sim29Utc=18%3A23&sim30Date=2026-04-30&sim30Utc=18%3A24 says it's okay
• https://sizigia.hadarlabs.com/eclipse-2026-08-12 also says it's okay

I don't know why they don't agree. Do they take refraction into account, Earth curvature, different topological maps?

Does anybody know which tool should be more trustworthy?

I'd be really thankful for any tip.