Wednesday 12 August 2026
What to do on the day
The eclipse is an evening event here: it begins at 6:01pm and is over by 8:10pm, with the Sun low in the west the whole time. Nothing about it needs a journey or a ticket - between 88.2% and 97.0% of the Sun goes wherever you already are. What it does need is about ten minutes of preparation, all of which can happen on the day.
The run of the evening
Times here are the earliest and latest anywhere in these islands; the exact minute shifts by around twenty minutes between the southwest and the northeast. Your town page has yours.
- In the morning. Check the cloud forecast on your town page. Check your eclipse glasses against a bright lamp - if you can see anything other than the lamp’s filament, or they are scratched or creased, they are not safe. If you have none, make a pinhole projector instead; it takes two pieces of card and five minutes.
- Late afternoon. Decide where you will stand. The one thing that spoils this eclipse is a rooftop: at maximum the Sun is about one fist held at arm’s length above the horizon, and lower still by the end, so a back garden hemmed in by houses may not see the finish. A park, a beach, a hilltop or a west-facing upstairs window all work. Stand where you plan to watch and hold a fist at arm’s length towards the west - if the skyline reaches above it, move.
- From 6:01pm - first contact. A small notch appears at the edge of the Sun and grows. Glasses on for every look from here on. The first half hour is slow; this is the stretch for setting up the pinhole or finding the crescents under a tree.
- Around 7:12pm - maximum. The Sun is a thin crescent. In the ten minutes either side, look away from it as well: the light goes cold and flat, shadows sharpen, and the evening dims like heavy cloud crossing a clear sky. That change is the part no photograph carries.
- By 8:10pm - last contact. The Moon clears the Sun’s disc with the Sun only a few degrees up, already behind houses and trees for most people. If your western view is open, the eclipse ends on a Sun sitting almost on the horizon, and sunset follows within the hour.
Worth doing while it happens
- Project it. A pinhole in a piece of card throws a crescent onto a second piece of card, and a kitchen colander throws dozens at once. This is the way to watch with children - nothing to hold to their face, nothing to look up at, and the image is on the ground in front of them.
- Stand under a tree. The gaps between leaves work as pinholes, and during a deep eclipse the ground underneath is covered in crescents. It costs nothing and it is the single most striking thing this eclipse does at ground level.
- Photograph the ground, not the Sun. Pointing a phone or camera at the Sun does not work - the sensor overexposes, and a long lens without a proper solar filter is dangerous. The crescents under a tree, the strange flat light on a familiar street, and the people watching all photograph well, and those pictures are the ones that look like the evening actually felt.
- Listen. Around maximum, birds sometimes fall quiet, as if dusk had come early. A deep partial eclipse is as much an atmosphere as a sight, and the atmosphere is easy to miss with your eyes on the Sun.
- Keep one eye on the clock. The live view plots the Sun’s path with the crescent at every moment of the evening, so you know what is happening above the cloud even when you cannot see it. Opened from your town page, it draws your own sky.
- Make an evening of it. The timing is on your side: an August evening, with the whole event fitting between finishing work and sunset. A picnic in the most open west-facing spot you know needs no more planning than that.
Every look at the Sun itself needs eclipse glasses certified to ISO 12312-2, from first contact to last - the eclipse is partial here, so a bright sliver of the Sun’s surface is exposed the entire time, and a low Sun that feels comfortable to look at is exactly as dangerous as a blinding one. How to watch safely.
If it clouds over
August cloud is the real gamble, and there is no pretending otherwise. But an eclipse this deep does not disappear behind cloud: the dimming around maximum happens anyway, and it is stranger under an overcast sky, because the whole grey ceiling fades at once with nothing visibly causing it. Breaks in cloud are common on August evenings, so stay out - thirty seconds of crescent through a gap is how most people saw 1999. And the forecast is local: cloud on your street does not mean cloud twenty minutes west, which is the one journey on the day worth considering.