The sunset eclipse

Inside the path of totality, the Moon covered the entire solar disk for a little over half a minute at some points and more than a minute and a half at others, depending on distance from the centerline. Just before and after came the diamond ring and Baily's beads — the last rays of photosphere squeezing through valleys on the Moon's edge — and between the two, the solar corona, the silvery-white halo the Sun's glare normally hides. The solar filter only came off there, between those two rings: the rest of the event, including the entire partial phase, required certified eclipse glasses (ISO 12312-2) on the whole time.

What made this eclipse different was the time of day: with the Sun between 1.7° and 12° above the horizon during totality, the sky already had sunset colors before it even began, and at most spots with full totality the Sun set during the partial phase — the «eclipsed sunset», an uncommon phenomenon.

The path crossed northern Spain and ended grazing Mallorca, about 294 km wide at its widest point — wider than the 2027 eclipse's path, consistent with how low the Sun was.

With the Sun so low, any nearby hill, building or tree could block totality even where the geometric calculation said it was visible. Of the 166 Spanish cities inside the path, 149 ended up seeing it in full above the real horizon; the other 17 lost it in the final stretch, blocked by terrain.

Beyond those 166 cities, another 3,533 viewpoints catalogued by eclipses.app were in the same case: full totality above the real horizon. The list of good spots ended up far longer than the list of towns, and there was no way to know it without calculating the real horizon point by point — not by reading a country-scale map of the path.

It was the geometric opposite of the 2027 eclipse: there the Sun will be at 37°-41°, well above any real terrain profile, so terrain stops deciding anything. In 2026 it was the reverse — terrain was exactly what decided who saw it whole and who lost the view in the final second.

After the eclipse, the community started leaving photos in a gallery open to anyone: totality, the diamond ring, Baily's beads, landscapes already under the shadow. It keeps growing with every new submission.

A form also opened to collect real timings from people who were there: the exact time they saw each contact, from where, and with what. That kind of material degrades with the weeks — memories blur, videos get lost — so the form is still open, and every submission helps check the calculation against what people actually observed.

Before the day, we precomputed 560 locations — 394 municipalities with more than 20,000 residents plus 166 districts of the largest cities — plus 18,878 viewpoints, each with its own real terrain horizon, not just the Sun's geometric position. The goal was to offer the most precise calculation we could find for whether an exact spot fell inside the path with totality clear of obstructions: a country-scale map can't tell you that, because the line is decided in meters of terrain, not kilometers of path.

The next eclipse visible from Spain is on August 2, 2027, total as well, but with the Sun very high (37°-41°) crossing southern Spain: there the problem stops being the horizon and becomes being inside a much narrower path, about 258 km wide.

After that, on January 26, 2028, an annular eclipse crosses Spain, also at sunset. The Moon doesn't quite cover the whole Sun: a ring of light stays visible the entire time, and the solar filter never comes off, however thin the ring looks.

The exact-location calculation still works the same way for both: real terrain horizon, historical and line-of-sight cloud cover, the same 0-to-100 score already used for the 2026 eclipse.