Watch today’s total solar eclipse live

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This article is part of a special report on the total solar eclipse that will offer the best views from the Arctic Circle, Iceland, Spain and parts of Portugal on August 12, 2026.

The 2026 total solar eclipse finally came upon us, marking the first total solar eclipse visible from parts of mainland Europe in almost three decades. Today, for a few brief moments, some one billion people experienced partly or fully dark skies as the moon passes directly in front of our star, obliterating its light.

On this day, the moon’s shadow raced at thousands of kilometers per hour across a swath of Earth that will include northern Russia, Greenland, Iceland and the North Atlantic before it reaches northern Spain and a tiny corner of Portugal just before sunset. Much of Europe, as well as certain parts of North Africa and North America, saw at least a partial eclipse.

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Read our complete guides to watching and documenting an eclipse—and remember to never look at the sun without adequate eye protection !

For Earth, the beauty of total solar eclipses is, in some ways, a happy accident of our position in the universe. The sun is around 400 times wider than the moon, but it is also about 400 times as far away, which is why they look to be about the same size in the sky. The inaugural first contact—the initial moment when the moon encroaches on the sun’s disk—occurred at 11:34 A.M. EDT in northern Siberia.

Second contact—better known as the start of totality, the point when the moon’s trailing edge reaches the sun’s disk and totally blots out our star—began around 12:58 P.M. EDT over that same region. But the point of greatest eclipse, when totality reached its maximum duration of two minutes and 18 seconds, happened some 48 minutes later, at about 1:46 P.M. EDT, at a spot about 45 kilometers off the western coast of Iceland, in the waters of the Denmark Strait.

Most spots on land had only around a minute of totality, however. This solar eclipse was brief: totality can sometimes last in excess of seven minutes in rare circumstances but not this time.

Even if you were not in Europe, you could watch the event live via this European Space Agency livestream , which began at 1:30 P.M. EDT. But you would have missed the myriad effects that come from experiencing an eclipse in person.

For anyone inside the path of totality, dramatic changes came during the final minutes before the moon completely covered the sun.