Two Minutes and Eighteen Seconds

It came down on us at a quarter to nine in the evening, low and orange, with the sun already sinking toward a ridge, and I have chased eleven of these and I have never seen one like it.

The track ran from Siberia across eastern Greenland, over the west coast of Iceland — Reykjavík got it whole, which almost never happens to a capital — and then down onto northern Spain, where it was roughly two hundred and ninety kilometres wide and where, because of the hour, totality arrived with the sun only a few degrees above the horizon. Maximum duration on the centreline was two minutes and eighteen seconds. We had a shade under two.

A low-sun totality is a different animal and nobody who has only seen a midday one is prepared for it. At noon the shadow arrives from the west like weather and the horizon goes an even bruised colour all the way around. At nine in the evening, with the sun near the ridge, the corona comes up over a landscape that is already gold, and the whole thing is happening at eye level, in the same part of the sky your brain has spent its entire life using to judge the end of a day.

The field we were in held maybe four hundred people, and about half were locals who had come up from the town with folding chairs and no equipment at all, and this is the part I want to write down before it fades. During the partial phases it is a picnic. There is chatter. Somebody's dog. Then the last thirty seconds arrive and the light does the thing that light does, which is not dimming — dimming is the wrong word, dimming is what a switch does. It sharpens. Shadows go knife-edged, the temperature drops four or five degrees on your arms, and the colour drains out of the grass while the sky keeps its colour.

And then it goes, and four hundred people make a sound. That is the actual reason I do this. Not the corona, though the corona this time had two enormous streamers running east-west and a prominence on the limb like a pink hook. The sound. It is the same sound in every country and it is not cheering. It is closer to the noise people make at a birth.

Two minutes. The town below us started ringing a bell, which nobody had organized. And then it was over and the light came back and everyone in that field stood around slightly stunned, doing what everyone always does after a totality, which is to immediately start planning the next one. August 2027, North Africa, six minutes. Six minutes. I have already looked at flights.

Glasses on for every second of the partial phases — every second, no exceptions, and they come off only when the last bead of sun goes and the corona is out, and they go straight back on the instant it returns.

Then the advice nobody takes and everybody who has seen more than one gives: do not photograph your first totality. Your phone will produce a small white smear you will delete. Twenty thousand better photographs will be online within the hour, taken by people with equatorial mounts.

Instead, spend fifteen of your two minutes not looking at the sun at all. Turn around. The horizon behind you is lit by sunlight from outside the shadow and is a colour you will not otherwise see on this planet. Look at the people. Look at the ground. The corona will still be there when you turn back, and you will have the only part of it that a photograph cannot bring home.

They had booked in 2023. They had a site chosen off climatology, which is the correct method, and the climatology was right — their spot had the better historical record. Weather is not climate and on the day a band came in off the coast and sat exactly there for forty minutes.

We were nine kilometres away in clear sky. There is no skill in this. Anyone who tells you they have eclipse luck has been lucky, and everyone in this hobby knows someone who has been clouded out twice.

One of them drove to our field afterwards, at eleven at night, just to talk to people who had seen it. We sat on a wall for an hour and described it to him. He asked good questions and did not once complain and I have been thinking about him all day.

August 2027 runs across North Africa with over six minutes on the centreline — one of the longest of the century. July 2028 crosses Australia and goes directly over Sydney.

My wife has seen four of these and has stopped arguing. She now asks only one question, which is whether the hotel has a bath, and the answer is being worked on.