One minute,
ten seconds

01The eclipse itself

Wednesday 12 August 2026, at El balcó del Priorat (41.2170° N, 0.7366° E, 573 m, above La Figuera). All times CEST. This is a low-sun eclipse: totality happens with the Sun barely above the ridgeline, about half an hour before it sets.

What you will actually see

Computed from Espenak's Besselian elements at 41.21697° N, 0.73657° E, 573 m. The Sun runs from azimuth 277° at first contact to 286° at totality and 294° at sunset. Contact times here are geometric and span 1m 08s. TresEclipses, which also models the Moon's limb profile, gets 1m 10s, and that is the figure used throughout: treat the two contact clocks as a second short at each end, which is the direction you want to be wrong in.

02Four days

Base is Falset, in the Priorat. Private transport throughout, arranged by Jaume. Drive times below are free-flow estimates from OSRM, so treat everything on eclipse day as optimistic.

03Who is here, and when

Everyone overlaps for Tuesday evening and eclipse day. From Thursday morning the group starts breaking up.

All eight are together for about 30 hours: Tuesday dinner and all of Wednesday. Six on Thursday morning, four from Thursday lunchtime to the end.

04Flights and getting around

Four origins, three return airports. Michael and Cecilia are the only ones using Reus, which is the closest airport to the Priorat.

Status is pulled live and refreshes on its own about once a minute. Every chip quotes the landing time, taken from the arrivals board at the airport the flight is going to. Tap a flight number for the full history.

Outbound · Tuesday 11 August

Return

Rayson and Danni, call Lufthansa before Friday. The booking is LH1133 to Frankfurt then LH204 on to Berlin at 21:55, and LH204 last flew on 30 May. It is not in the August schedule on any day: Frankfurt to Berlin that evening is LH202 at 19:45 and LH206 at 21:45, checked across eight consecutive days. LH1133 lands at 19:30, so LH202 is too tight to connect and LH206 is the one that works, landing 22:55.

Leave-by times assume two hours at the airport and free-flow driving. Bot to BCN is 143 minutes, which is what sets both Thursday and Friday. Add margin if the roads are still busy after the eclipse.

05Where everything is

Barcelona is on the right, the airport pin is BCN. Everything else is packed into a 50 km square between Falset, la Figuera and Bot. The shaded band is the path of totality: north of the upper line, including Barcelona itself, the Sun never fully goes out. Tap any pin.

If you ever have to get yourself to the viewpoint, the coordinates are 41.21697, 0.73657. Type the name into a phone instead and you can end up at the Balcó del Priorat hotel in La Morera de Montsant, 20 km away over the Montsant range.

06Kit

Glasses, a fleece, a torch, water, something to sit on.

07Filming it on a phone

Written for an iPhone 17 Pro or Pro Max, the phone most of us are carrying. At 1× that camera is a 24 mm lens, and with the Sun this low it will not resolve the corona. What it does get is the dark sky, the orange horizon all the way round, eight people losing it, and the sound of it. Set the phone up at 17:30, start it at 20:29:10, then leave it alone.

That is the shot, at 1×, with the horizon a third of the way up and the Sun 4.7° above it. The two boxes are the 17 Pro's telephoto: 4× at 100 mm, and the 8× crop at 200 mm. Both throw away the ridge, the horizon and everyone's faces to make a dot slightly less small, and put the uncovered Sun on the telephoto sensor, where the burnt-pixel reports come from. One exception, at the bottom of this section.

Run sheet

1. 17:30Arrive and set up

   Do the fiddling in daylight, when you can still see what you are pointing at.

2. 19:35Filter on

   Tape a whole spare pair of glasses face down over the camera plateau. The three lenses sit in a triangle and the app swaps between them by itself, so one lens taped over one hole does nothing.

   Filter on
3. 20:29:10Roll

   1×, exposure locked, thirteen seconds early. Then stop touching it.

   Filter on
4. 20:29:23Filter off · about 70 s

   Off the lens at the same moment the glasses come off your face.

   Filter off · look up
5. 20:30:30Both back on

   Filter on the lens, glasses on your face, at the first returning bead.

   Filter on

If you have a second phone

08Garnatxa, briefly

Grenache, in Catalan. One grape family behind almost everything you will be handed over four days, from a pale skin-contact white in Terra Alta to something dense and mineral off Priorat slate.

09The path

The shadow lands in Arctic Siberia at sunrise, runs west across the pole, turns south down Greenland, over Iceland and across the open Atlantic into Spain. The umbra lifts off the Earth just past the Balearics.

Across Spain in about four minutes

Because the Sun is setting, the shadow strikes Spain at a grazing angle and races. Over Catalonia it moves at roughly 4.6 km per second, about 16,000 km/h, five or six times faster than a typical midday eclipse shadow. It makes landfall on the Asturian coast at about 20:27 and is out over the Mediterranean past the Ebro delta four minutes later.

Computed from Espenak's Besselian elements. Highlighted rows are places on this trip. Barcelona and Madrid both sit just outside the edge on a 99%-plus partial, which looks like a slightly odd late afternoon and nothing more.

10Why this happens at all

A total solar eclipse depends on a coincidence with no physical reason behind it. The Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon and also about 400 times further away, so the two discs appear almost exactly the same size from the ground. No other moon in the solar system does this.

The eclipse by the numbers

11Who to call

Jaume runs the whole thing. Anything about beds, timings, the van or the viewpoint goes to him.