Astronomical Events

August 10–16, 2026

Written by Mia Astrology

There are ordinary astronomy weeks, the kind where I tell you to find a dark field, allow your eyes twenty minutes to adjust and perhaps bring a flask of coffee because Saturn will not reorganise its schedule around your bedtime, and then there are weeks like this one, when the universe apparently looks at the calendar, decides subtlety is overrated and places a total solar eclipse, a New Moon and the peak of the Perseid meteor shower within roughly the same twenty-four-hour period.

I live in Iceland, and I keep returning to that fact because this time the great astronomical event is not happening in some desert thousands of miles away while I follow it through photographs and livestreams.

It is coming here.

On Wednesday, August 12, 2026, the Moon’s central shadow will pass over parts of northern Russia, Greenland, western Iceland, the North Atlantic, northern and eastern Spain and a tiny corner of northeastern Portugal. A much larger partial eclipse will be visible across much of Europe, northwestern Africa, most of Canada and parts of the northern United States. (NASA Science)

That distinction matters.

People across a vast area will be able to see the Moon covering part of the Sun, but only those standing inside the narrow path of totality will see the Sun’s bright surface disappear completely, the solar corona emerge around the black Moon and daylight briefly collapse into something that resembles a very strange, very sudden twilight.

And Iceland is one of those places.

I feel almost absurdly lucky to be living here right now because this will be Iceland’s first total solar eclipse since 1954, Reykjavík’s first since June 17, 1433, and Reykjavík will not experience another until May 26, 2245. (eclipse2026.is)

So no, this is not something we can casually postpone because the traffic looks annoying, the weather is doing an Icelandic impression of uncertainty or somebody forgot where they put the eclipse glasses.

This is the day.