Greatest eclipse is at August 12, 5:45 PM in your zone, with the Sun and Moon at 20°02′ Leo, near the South Node, 100 percent covered. Where it can be seen: total path: Greenland, Iceland, northern Spain. Partial: Europe, north Asia, north/west Africa, much of North America.
The Sun goes out at midday and the stars come back, and every bird stops singing at once.
In a total solar eclipse the Moon covers the whole disk of the Sun for those standing in the path of her umbra. The sky darkens to a deep twilight, the temperature drops, the horizon glows in every direction, and the Sun’s corona, the white atmosphere never otherwise seen, stands out around the black Moon. Totality lasts from a few seconds to a little over seven minutes. It is the rarest thing in this app to see with one’s own eyes, and the tradition reads it as the strongest of all eclipses.
A total solar eclipse at the heart of Leo, the path crossing from Greenland through Iceland and on to northern Spain—the first total the Spanish sky has given since 1905. For a few minutes at mid-afternoon, the heart's light is taken away so the heart can feel itself in the dark. And in the dark, some old vitality that had been held too long gets dizzy with release—a drunken, unsober gladness, the body remembering what it had trained itself to forget. What have you been shining for out of habit, and what would you shine for if you chose again? Leo does not forget. In the minute of totality, the sky gives the question back to the ones looking up.
An eclipse at the South Node: the Dragon’s Tail, which lets the light go and takes what was finished with it.
This eclipse falls near the South Node, at 20°02′ Leo, the degree whose image is flightless birds answering an old dream of sky—the reach itself more moving than any rising could be. Astrologers read South Node eclipses as releases: what they take is familiar, sometimes clung to, and already spent. The tradition treats the weeks after as a time when something leaves that was going to leave anyway, and it counsels letting it, since what the Tail takes it does not give back.
20°02′ Leo, the twenty-first degree. Flightless birds answering an old dream of sky—the reach itself more moving than any rising could be.
Every eclipse has a family. Its elders came eighteen years before, a third of the world to the west.
Times are shown in your time zone (UTC).