Anna: Good day and welcome to Astronomy
AstroDailyPod. I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm Avery. And if you only listen to us
once this year, make it the next
Anna: two days, because tomorrow, the 12th of
August, the moon does something it hasn't
done over mainland Europe since
1999. It slides
completely in front of the sun, the one and
only total solar eclipse of
2026.
Avery: And then, once the sun goes down, the same
new Moon that made that eclipse possible
steps out of the way entirely. Hands us the
darkest Perseid meteor peak in about 20
years.
Anna: One new moon, two headline events
roughly 24 hours apart. We'll set the
whole thing up for you. Northern and southern
skies both, Plus a
Avery: rough morning for one Chinese rocket, a, uh,
quieter question mark hanging over another,
and Japan quietly finishing off its own
answer to gps. Let's get into it.
Anna: So let's talk about tomorrow properly,
because this is a genuinely rare one. Uh, a
total solar eclipse happens somewhere on
Earth roughly 18 months or so. But the
last time totality touched down anywhere on
the planet was April 2024 over
North America. That's more than two years
ago. Tomorrow ends that drought,
and the geography of this one is strange and
beautiful. Most total eclipses
race roughly west to east across the middle
of the globe. This one goes over the top of
the world. The Moon's shadow first touches
down in the far north of Siberia, then
arcs up and over the North Pole, drops
down onto eastern Greenland, crosses the west
coast of Iceland, including Reykjavik,
and finishes across northern Spain and just
clips the northwestern corner of Portugal.
Totality itself is brief. At most
about 2 minutes and 18 seconds right on
the centre line. Blink and you miss it by
eclipse standards. But the setting more than
makes up for it, because in Spain, the sun
is hanging low in the west, close to the
horizon. In the last light before sunset,
imagine the sun's corona flaring out over
a Spanish skyline at dusk. That's
the image people have been planning trips
around for years now before anyone
in the Southern Hemisphere gets their hopes
up. Let me be straight with you, because we
always are on this show. This eclipse is a
Northern Hemisphere event full stop.
Totality is only over Greenland,
Iceland, northern Spain and that little bit
of Portugal. A much wider slice of the world
gets a partial eclipse. Parts of North
America, especially eastern Canada and
the northeastern United States, will see the
sun take a bite low in the sky near sunset.
But here in Australia, we see nothing at
all. So southern listeners, stay with us.
Your night is coming later in the show, and
it's a good one.
Here's the scale that gets me though, add up
everyone who falls under at least a partial
shadow tomorrow across Europe, North Africa,
northern Asia and much of North America.
And you're talking on the order of, um, a
billion people who can in principle
look up and see the moon and sun overlap.
One event, a billion potential witnesses.
And it's not just a spectacle, it's a working
day for scientists. Those couple of minutes
of totality are one of the only times we can
study the sun's corona, that faint outer
atmosphere directly from the ground.
Space agencies and observatories along the
track are gearing up. The European Space
Agency, for instance, is running a live
broadcast from the Havalambra Observatory in
Spain, stitching together telescope feeds and
drone footage so that even if you're nowhere
near the path, you can watch totality as it
happens. The ever reality is the
weather, of course. It always is with
eclipses. Greenland is remote and cold,
but the air coming off the ice sheet actually
tends to clear the skies, so the odds there
aren't bad. Iceland is Iceland. It
could be crystal clear or socked in with
cloud, sometimes within the same hour.
And Spain has the best of both worlds for
most travellers. Reliable late summer skies
and the roads, airports and towns to actually
get people into the path. That's why the bulk
of eclipse chasers are converging on Spain
and Iceland tonight, watching forecasts
like hawks. We'll give you the exact viewing
times for the path and for North America, um,
in the sky watch at the end. For now, the
headline is simply, After 27
years, totality is coming home to Europe.
And whatever the sky is doing where you are
tomorrow. It is worth a look, it really
is.
Avery: And from something rising to something that
came down the hard way.
So yesterday was by any measure an
extraordinary day for launches. Four flights
across three countries inside about 12 hours.
And China opened it with a hard one to watch
along March 7 a. That's a state rocket
from the big state contractor cask,
lifted off from the Wenchang launch site on
the island of Hainan. And about 85 seconds
into the flight, still climbing, still on
that first main burn, it exploded.
A large fireball, a cloud of debris, and
effectively a total loss of the vehicle and
its payload. The payload was reported to be
a communications satellite, Zhongsheng 4B,
heading for a high orbit China. Space
authorities hadn't put out a detailed
statement as of our recording, so we're
holding the payload detail lightly. But the
outcome itself isn't in doubt. The rocket was
lost. There's a bit of history here too. This
was the 18th flight of the long March 7th A
and awkwardly, the very first one back in
2020 also ended in failure.
So this is a rocket that's flown a lot and
mostly, well, having a very public bad day.
The bigger question is knock on effects. The
long March 7 family is the workhorse that
carries cargo up to China's Tiangong Space
Station. So depending on what the
investigation finds, some upcoming missions
could slip while engineers work out what went
wrong. Now, here's where I want to be careful
because these storeys get tangled. That
failure is one rocket. There was a second
completely separate Chinese launch on the
manifest for the same night, and it's a
storey. We've been following the private
company Landspace and its Zhu K3.
Different company, different launch site.
Jioquan, well over 2000 kilometres from
Wenchang and a very different goal.
Zhu K3 is a reusable stainless steel
methane fueled rocket and last night's flight
was its second attempt to fly to orbit and
then bring its first stage back for a
propulsive landing. Legs touchsc. The Falcon
9 trick. And I want to keep our facts
straight from last week. This would be
China's fourth orbital class recovery
attempt, not its first. China already landed
an orbital booster back in July when a long
3-10-B was caught in a net. What makes
ZK3 different is the method, legs
and engine thrust setting down on a pad
rather than being caught. That's the
milestone Landspace is chasing as we record.
We don't have a confirmed result on that z k3
attempt. And honestly, that's worth a word.
Landspace has form for going quiet. Its
debut flight last year was scrubbed and then
postponed for days with barely a word before
it eventually flew. So the silence tonight
could mean the outcome just hasn't reached
English language press yet. Or it could mean
the flight quietly slipped. We're not going
to guess. When it's confirmed, we'll bring it
to you properly.
Anna: A, uh, rocket lost and another we're still
waiting on.
Meanwhile, the sky above all of it is about
to put on a free show. The Perseids.
Now everyone knows the Perseids. They're the
reliable old friend of the northern summer.
The shower people actually plan barbecues
and camping trips around. But
2026 is special. And I want to
explain why. Because it's a lovely bit of
cosmic coincidence. The peak lands
overnight on the 12th into the 13th,
the same date as the eclipse. And that is
not an accident. A, uh, total solar
eclipse can only happen at New Moon when
The Moon is between us and the Sun. And
this year that new moon falls almost
exactly on the Perseid peak. So
the very thing that darkens the sun by day
leaves the night sky completely moonless.
No moonlight washing out the faint meteors.
It's the best set of conditions the Perseids
have had in roughly two decades.
The meteors themselves are debris from a
comet. Comet 109P,
Swift Tuttle, a big one on a
133 year orbit. Every
August, the Earth ploughs through the trail
of dust it's left behind. And those specks
hit our atmosphere and burn up as shooting
stars. When Swift Tuttle itself last
swung through the inner solar system in the
early 1990s, the Perseids
briefly went berserk. Hundreds of meteors
an hour. The comet's long gone back out
now, so we won't see that this year, in
fact, and I'll be honest, because a moon this
sky can raise expectations. The
forecasters are being measured about the raw
numbers this year. The textbook figure is up
to about a hundred meteors an hour under
perfect conditions. But the meteor
specialists are quietly expecting something
more like 30 to 50 an hour from a
genuinely dark site this time around.
Activity dips a little this year before
picking back up in 2027. There
is one tantalising wildcard, though.
Models suggest the Earth might just clip a
couple of older, narrow dust trails around
the peak one laid down almost a thousand
years ago. If that happens, you could get a
short burst of extra meteors. It's not
guaranteed. The timing has hours of
uncertainty and even the models don't promise
a storm. But it's the kind of maydy that
gets meteor watchers out of bed. The next
genuine outburst that forecasters are
confident about isn't until 2028,
and that one will favour North America. So
the storey of these Perseids isn't really a
hundred an hour. It's the darkest
skies in 20 years. A rare same
day pairing with a total eclipse and a
small chance of a bonus. We'll tell you
exactly when and where to look at the end.
Avery: Love it. And from ancient comet dust to some
very modern hardware. Staying with that busy
launch day, because not all of it was
fireballs.
Over In Japan, an H3 rocket lifted off
from the Tanegashima Space Centre carrying a
hefty navigation satellite. And with it,
Japan took a quietly strategic step. The
satellite is called Michibiki no. 7.
Michibiki, meaning guiding or showing the
way. And it brings Japan's quasi
Zenith satellite system up to full strength.
That's a bit of a mouthful. So here's the
idea. Most of us rely on America's
gps. It's brilliant. But in a place like
Japan, narrow streets, high rise
canyons, steep mountains, GPS
signals can get blocked or bounce around and
throw your position off. Japan's fix is
clever. These quasi zenith satellites fly
in looping orbits that, that keep at least
one of them almost directly overhead, near
the zenith over Japan and the wider Asia
Pacific at all times. A signal coming
straight down is much harder to block than
one coming in low across a skyline. So
Michibiki sharpens and reinforces GPS from
directly above, getting positioning down to
remarkable precision. With this launch,
Japan has the satellites it needs to run that
system as a full standalone service.
And the strategic point is resilience. Japan
now has its own regional backbone that keeps
working even if it can't lean entirely on
someone else's system. In a world where
navigation underpins everything from farming
to shipping to your phone maps, quietly
owning your own overhead layer is a big deal.
And there's a neat little footnote. This
satellite is also carrying a hosted American
payload, a space surveillance camera built
for the US Space force. So, ah, a Japanese
navigation satellite is quietly doubling as a
US space watching sensor. Which tells you how
closely the two allies now work together up
there. Not a fireball, but arguably the most
consequential thing that flew all day.
Anna: From satellites that tell us exactly where we
are to the oldest navigation tool there
is the sky itself.
Let's get you outside. This is the practical
bit and we're doing both hemispheres as
always. Northern friends, you've got the
doubleheader. Southern friends, hang on. Your
turn is coming and it's all yours.
First, the eclipse, the timings. The
moon's shadow sweeps through in the late
afternoon and evening European time in
rough universal time. Totality begins up
in the high Arctic a little before 17
UT, reaches greatest eclipse around
1746 UT and finishes
over Spain and Portugal by about
1834 UT. On the ground,
that means Iceland sees totality in the late
afternoon. Spain sees it in the early
evening with the sun low and close to
setting. North America, you're getting a
partial, not totality, and it's uh, a low
in the sky, near sunset affair for
eastern Canada and the northeastern United
States. The further northeast you are,
the more of a bite you'll see further
west. And it fades out. And now the rule
we never, ever trim. A, uh, partial
eclipse is not safe to look at with the naked
eye, not for a Second, you must
use certified eclipse glasses or viewers
that meet the ISO
123122
safety standard or watch by indirect
projection like a simple pinhole.
Ordinary sunglasses, smoked glass,
phone cameras, none of that protects your
eyes. The only moment it is ever safe
to look directly is during total totality
itself. And that only happens inside
that narrow path in Greenland,
Iceland and Spain. Everywhere else
glass is on the whole time. Please
look after your eyes then after
dark. The Perseids for the Northern
hemisphere the peak is overnight on the 12th
into the 13th and with no moon at all,
conditions are as good as they get. Best
viewing is after midnight from roughly 2am
until dawn when the shower's radiant climbs
high. Get somewhere dark, lie back,
give your eyes 20 minutes to adjust and
don't stare at your phone. Realistically
30 to 50 an hour from a dark sight.
More if that dust trail wildcard comes off
now. Southern hemisphere, this is yours. Two
bits of bad news then the good stuff. You
can't see tomorrow's eclipse and the Perseids
barely clear the horizon for us because their
radiant sits low in the north. So don't
stay up chasing them from Sydney. Instead
look before dawn. The pre dawn eastern
sky right now has a lovely lineup of planets
strung along it. A genuine naked eye treat.
No equipment needed and much better placed
for us than for the north in M the evening.
Brilliant. Venus is your beacon, low in the
west after sunset. And for anyone with
binoculars, Comet 10P Tempel
2 is still tracking across southern skies.
A soft little smudge that rewards a dark
sky and a bit of patience. That's a
southern hemisphere favoured comet, so make
the most of it.
Avery: So wherever you are on the planet there is
something up there for you over the next 48
hours. Northern skies get the once in a
generation eclipse than the meteors. Southern
skies get the planets Venus and the comet.
Anna: If tomorrow sparks something for you, come
and share it. TheNewAstronomyDaily
IO has our full back catalogue, a
news feed we keep fresh through the day,
listener reviews and a contact form. So if
you catch the eclipse or a great Perseid,
tell us and sign
Avery: up for the daily newsletter while you're
there. So the next Big sky event lands
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Anna: socials astrodaily Pod that's
Astronomy AstroDailyPod for Tuesday. Whatever
your sky's doing M tomorrow. Glasses on for
the sun, eyes up for the meteors from
Anna and me.
Avery: Thanks for listening.
Anna: Clear skies.
Mhm.
Avery: We're told.