Anna: Somewhere over the Arctic this afternoon, the
sun is about to go out. Not for long,
a couple of minutes at most. But for the
first time on mainland Western Europe since
1999.
Avery: And here in the studio, it's the middle of a
Sydney afternoon. So we're gonna watch it the
way most of you will on a screen in the small
hours, wide eyed.
Welcome to Astronomy AstroDailyPod. I'm
Avery.
Anna: And I'm anna. It's Wednesday 12th
August. Today, the only total
solar eclipse of the how to catch it
wherever you are, a NASA jet that chases
the shadow. A magnetic field caught in the
act of building a star. Why some
worlds cook themselves alive. And
tonight, a moonless meteor shower. Let's
go. If you only clock one thing in the
sky this year, it's happening in the next few
hours. Today the moon's shadow falls
across the far north of the planet and gives
a lucky narrow strip of the world a total
solar eclipse. The only one of
2026.
Avery: Give us the geography because this is a
strange one. It doesn't run the usual way.
Anna: It doesn't. Most totalities race
roughly west to east. This one arcs
up and over the pole. It begins at
sunrise over the Taymyr Peninsula in
Arctic Russia, sweeps across the top of the
world and down the eastern side of Greenland,
crosses western Iceland, Reykjavik included,
then runs out over the North Atlantic, clips
a tiny corner of northeastern Portugal and
finishes by crossing northern Spain from
Galicia to the Mediterranean, ending near the
Balearics right at sunset.
Avery: And um, this is a big deal specifically for
Europe.
Anna: A uh, huge deal. It's the first total
solar eclipse over western Mainland Europe
since 11 August
1999, 27 years almost
to the day. For Spain it's the first
since 1905, for Iceland the
first since 1954. People have
booked these spots years out.
Avery: So if I'm standing in the path, what do I
actually get?
Anna: Not long, but unforgettable. Maximum
totality is about 2 minutes and 18
seconds out over the Atlantic near the
centerline. On land it's shorter. In
Reykjavik, totality lands around
17:48 Universal Time. That's
just before six in the evening local and
gives you a bit over a minute. Out on the
Iceland's Snaefelsnes peninsula you do better
then over in northern Spain, totality
falls around 18:27 to
18:33 UT that's
8:27 to 8:33 in the evening,
local evening.
Avery: So the sun's getting low, very low.
Anna: That's the catch. In Spain, the sun sits only
about 10 degrees up on the north coast and
as little as 4 degrees near the Balearic
Sea. Gorgeous if you've got a clean horizon.
But a hill, a forest, a building and you
miss it. And the weather split is almost
poetic. Iceland is climatologically
the cloudier bet, Spain, the sunnier one.
But Spain makes you pay with that low sun.
Avery: Okay, now the part most of our audience
needs, because most of us are nowhere near
that strip, start with North America, our
biggest audience.
Anna: North America gets a genuine partial this
afternoon. No totality anywhere on the
continent, but a real bite out of the sun.
And the further northeast you are, the bigger
the bite. Eastern Canada does best.
Nova Scotia sees around a third of the sun
covered, about 33%. Northern
Maine gets close to 28. Montreal
about 18. Boston around 16,
peaking near 155 in the afternoon
Eastern time. New York around 9 or
10% about 1:54. Eastern
Toronto about 8, Washington D.C.
about 10. And Alaska gets a lovely
one in the morning. Fairbanks around
37%.
Avery: And um, crucially, that's a partial. So the
rules are different.
Anna: Completely different. And I'll say it
plainly, if you're seeing a partial, the sun
is never fully covered, so you must keep
certified eclipse glasses on the entire
time. We'll do the full safety line at the
end, but that's the headline for North
America. Glasses on, start to finish.
Avery: Europe, outside the path, a deep partial
Anna: low in the evening sky. London around
91% covered. Paris, about
92. Berlin 85.
Vienna 87. Dramatic, but
again, partial. So eye protection throughout.
Avery: And then there's us, the Southern Hemisphere,
Australia, New Zealand.
Anna: Be honest with them straight up, we see
nothing of this one directly, not a
sliver. It's an entirely northern
hemisphere event. But, and this is the good
news, you can absolutely watch it live.
NASA time and date and the exploratorium
are all streaming from the path, including
telescope feeds out of Spain in Australian
Eastern time. That coverage runs roughly
half past one to six in the morning Thursday,
with the totality highlights landing
somewhere around three to half past 4m am
AEST, set an alarm, make a
coffee and you'll see the corona in real
time.
Avery: That corona being the whole reason people
chase these.
Anna: That's it for those two minutes. The moon
blocks the blinding disc of the sun and
reveals the corona, the faint, pearly
outer atmosphere we almost never get to see.
It's not just beautiful, it's scientifically
precious. Which, nice segue, is
exactly why NASA is about to chase this
shadow in a jet.
Avery: So while millions look up One NASA team
is going to look sideways at, uh, nearly
50,000ft. As the eclipse
crosses today, a NASA WB57
high altitude jet will fly along the
path and literally chase the Moon's shadow.
Anna: Why fly it rather than just stand still like
the rest of us?
Avery: Because if you move with the shadow, you
stretch out your totality from the ground.
You get a couple of minutes from that jet.
Cruising at around 740 kilometres
an hour, the team extends your view of
totality to nearly three. In the nose
cone sit four cameras, visible and
infrared, shooting at least 20 frames a
second. The instrument's got a great name.
Sci fi, scientifically calibrated in
flight imagery
Anna: and the science thereafter.
Avery: The corona's biggest riddles. One,
how the corona gets heated to something like
a million degrees when the surface below it
is a mere 5,500 thousand.
Two, how those great looping prominences
form and hang suspended above the sun. And
three, how material in the corona feeds into
the solar wind that washes over all of us.
The printable investigator is Amir Caspi at
the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder.
And his line is lovely. The sun is always
changing. Every eclipse is different. So we
might see something we've never seen before.
Anna: And a, uh, total eclipse gives them something
no spacecraft can.
Avery: Right, exactly. And this is the clever
bit. Space telescopes block the sun's disc
with a little occulting disc called a
coronagraph. But that also hides the inner
corona closest to the surface, the very
region where the heating happens. A, uh, real
eclipse with the moon as a perfect occulture
hands you that inner corona for free,
frying above the clouds. And most of the
water vapour also opens up infrared
wavelengths you can't get from the ground.
These same cameras flew the 2024 eclipse over
North America. The team fixed some
overexposed frames and sped up the Software
so the 2026 data should come back sharper
and faster.
Anna: And it's not just the jet, there's a whole
balloon army.
Avery: There is the NASA supported
nationwide Eclipse Balloon Beijing project
led by Angela Dejardins at Montana State
University is sending students from US
Icelandic and Spanish universities to
launch scientific balloons, around
86 of them from Iceland and Spain.
Before, during and after the eclipse.
They're measuring what happens to the
atmosphere when day suddenly turns to
dusk. The ozone and the so called boundary
layer near the ground that shifts with
temperature and moisture. As NASA's Eclipse
Programme Manager Kelly Couric put it, an
eclipse gives us a vantage point on the sun
we can't get anywhere else in the solar
system. And today, students get to grab
it.
Anna: From the Sun's outer atmosphere to the birth
of a star entirely. And a 30 year old
mystery just got solved. Using the Alma
array in Chile, astronomers have captured the
first direct high resolution image of a
magnetic field wrapped tightly around the jet
streaming out of a still forming star.
Avery: Paint the picture. What does it actually look
like?
Anna: Picture a twisted funnel shaped field, a
corkscrew of magnetism sheathing the gas
that's blasting away from the young star. The
target is a mouthful. NGC
1333 IRS 4A,
a young double star system tucked inside the
Perseus molecular cloud about 960
light years away. And seeing that field wound
around the outflow confirms a prediction
theorists have been making for decades about
how these jets are launched and shaped.
Avery: Why does a baby star even need a jet?
Anna: Beautiful question. It's a survival trick.
As a star gathers material, it also gathers
spin. Too much spin and it would tear itself
apart before it ever finished forming. The
magnetic field and the jet act like a release
valve M they carry away excess material and
angular momentum so the star can keep growing
rather than spinning itself to pieces. This
image shows the mechanism doing its job.
Avery: And there's a bigger echo here, isn't there?
Anna: There is, and this is the part I love. The
same basic physics. A magnetic field
channelling a jet is thought to play out at
wildly different scales across the universe.
From a newborn star like this one, all the
way up to supermassive black holes that fire
jets across entire galaxies. Same
trick, unimaginably different sizes.
The work is led by Tao Chung Ching, a former
Jansky Fellow at the US National Radio
Observatory. Published in Nature
Communications and a small point of pride for
our part of the sky. ALMA sits high in the
Atacama in Chile, very much a Southern
Hemisphere machine.
Avery: Here's a question that sounds simple and
absolutely isn't. Why did Venus,
Earth's twin in size, turn into a furnace
while Earth stayed livable? A planetary
scientist at UC Riverside, Stephen Kane,
thinks a big part of the answer might be
something we routinely overlook. How fast a
planet spins then really,
Anna: why would rotation decide whether a world is
hospitable?
Avery: Because rotation sets how a star's heat gets
spread around a planet. It shapes the winds,
the weather, the way an atmosphere and any
ocean circulate. Earth's roughly 24
hour day keeps the energy moving and the
climate regulated. Spin a world down slow
enough, Kane argues, and you may tip it
toward a runaway greenhouse. Heat pours in,
can't escape, and you end up with Venus, a
uh, crushing atmosphere and a surface hot
enough to melt lead.
Anna: So to test that on other planets, we just
measure how fast they spin.
Avery: That's the rub. It's genuinely hard. In a
paper accepted by the Astronomical Journal,
Kane warns that when you look at a distant
planet, the motion you detect might be its
howling winds, not the solid body underneath.
Exactly the confusion Venus throws at us. The
proposed fix is to observe at several
wavelengths that probe different depths of
the atmosphere and separate the true spin
from the wind.
Anna: And there's a mission coming that could
actually run this experiment at scale.
Avery: There is ESA's Plato, due to launch in
March 2027. It's built to find and
monitor lots of planets. And Cain reckons it
could turn up hundreds of Venus like worlds
if they're all slow rotators. That's a strong
hint that spin really is a switch between a
living world and a hellish one. If they're
all over the place, we look elsewhere. Either
way, a uh, lovely testable idea.
Anna: And the sky isn't done with us today.
Tonight, the night of the 12th into the 13th,
the Perseid meteor shower hits its peak.
And here's the gift. It's genuinely moonless
because the same new moon that's giving the
north its eclipse leaves our meteor sky pitch
dark. These are the best Perseid conditions
in years. Best window between
midnight and dawn. And best of all in the pre
dawn hours of the 13th when the radiant
up in Perseus climbs highest. For the
northern hemisphere, North America
especially, this is your night. Get away
from town lights, look up after midnight.
Give your eyes 20 minutes and let them
wander. No telescope, no glasses,
just a dark sky and patience.
Avery: And um, for those of us down south where
Perseus barely gets off the
Anna: floor, for Cygny and the southern
hemisphere, the Perseus radiant only just
scrapes the northern horizon, so you'll catch
a trickle at best. Don't fret. The
evening sky pays you back right after
sunset. Venus is blazing low in the
west, magnitude minus
4.4, impossible to miss
and just past its half lit
dichotomy phase. If you've a telescope
then before dawn there's a fine lineup of
planets strung across the eastern sky.
And Comet 10P Tempel 2 is
still a southern hemisphere favoured
binocular Target 1 for our part of the world.
Avery: And um, the eclipse times one more time for
everyone.
Anna: For North America it's an afternoon. Partial
Boston peaking about 1:55,
New York about 1:54 Eastern Time.
Glasses on throughout. For Australia and
the wider southern hemisphere it's the live
streams roughly half 1 to 6 in the
morning AEST Thursday with
totality around 3 to half 4am M
Thursday.
And that brings us to the line we never
never look at a partly eclipsed sun without
proper protection. Use eclipse glasses
or a handheld solar viewer that meet the
ISO
123122
standard. Ordinary sunglasses are not
safe and neither is an unfiltered camera
phone, binocular or telescope. If
you're in the path of totality, you may look
with the naked eye only during those brief
seconds when the sun is complet completely
covered and glasses go straight back on the
instant the bright edge returns not in the
path, then it's a partial the whole time.
Protection stays on from start to finish.
Avery: Whatever you catch today a uh, partial, a
stream or the meteors tonight, tell us about
it. Everything lives at astronomydaily
IO the back catalogue, the daily news
feed, the newsletter, and a spot to leave a
review or drop us a line. We're at Astral
AstroDailyPod Pod everywhere.
Anna: We'll be back tomorrow to tell you how Shadow
Day went, the images, the science, and
whatever the sun decided to show us. Until
then, from Avery and from Anna.
Avery: Enjoy the eclipse.
Anna: Mind your eyes and clear skies.