Millions of people across Europe and North America will witness a solar eclipse on Wednesday, Aug. 12, but the event will vary greatly depending on the location. A narrow corridor stretching from Greenland to northeastern Spain will experience a total solar eclipse, much of Europe will enjoy a deep partial eclipse, and parts of North America will see a smaller partial eclipse.

Want to know what you can expect to see from where you are? Here's an overview of the event from various locations, along with the exact viewing times for the Aug. 12 solar eclipse.

Remember, it's important to wear certified solar eclipse glasses during all partial phases of the eclipse. Totality ‪—‬ when the sun's face is completely blocked by the moon ‪—‬ is the only time it's safe to remove your eclipse glasses. (It’s not too late to order last-minute eclipse glasses if you don’t have a pair on hand.)

If you're in the path of totality

If you're fortunate enough to be inside the 180-mile-wide (290 kilometers) path of totality — the path of the dark shadow of the moon — in eastern Greenland, western Iceland or northeastern Spain, you'll experience the moon completely covering the sun for up to 2 minutes, 18 seconds. The sky will darken to twilight, bright stars and planets may appear in the daytime sky, and the sun's spectacular corona (its wispy outer atmosphere) will become visible. Here’s a handy guide to all the gear you’ll need to get the most out of totality.

The closer you are to the centerline of the path, the longer totality will last. But the most important consideration is to stay within the boundaries of the path, because it has a hard edge. Madrid, for example, is barely outside the path and will see a 99.99% partial eclipse — and no totality whatsoever. The partial phases last an hour on each side of totality.

Here's when totality will occur in various locations for the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse:

• Scoresby Sund, Greenland: 4:35 p.m. WGST (up to 2 minutes, 17 seconds)
• Reykjavik, Iceland: 5:48 p.m. GMT (60 seconds)
• León, Spain: 8:28 p.m. CEST (1 minute, 45 seconds)
• Soria, Spain: 8:29 p.m. CEST (1 minute, 43 seconds)
• S'Arenal, Mallorca, Spain: 8:31 p.m. CEST (1 minute, 36 seconds)

If you're in North America

Viewers in North America will see a modest partial eclipse, with the biggest eclipse seen from northern and eastern Canada, Alaska and the northeastern U.S. The farther northeast you are, the deeper the eclipse will appear. Eclipse glasses are essential at every stage of the two-hour event, because there will be no totality. Here are the times of maximum eclipse in various locations:

• Iqaluit, Nunavut: 1:24 p.m. EDT (61% eclipse)
• St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador: 3:00 p.m. NDT (53%)
• Fairbanks, Alaska: 8:27 a.m. AKDT (37%)
• Anchorage, Alaska: 8:21 a.m. AKDT (28%)
• Bangor, Maine: 1:53 p.m. EDT (23%)
• Quebec City: 1:46 p.m. EDT (24%)
• Montreal: 1:45 p.m. EDT (18%)
• Boston: 1:55 p.m. EDT (16%)
• New York: 1:54 p.m. EDT (9%)

If you want to watch totality from outside the path, there are many live stream options available, including planned streams from NASA and the European Space Agency.

If you're elsewhere in Europe and North Africa

Most of Europe and far northwestern Africa will see a spectacular deep partial eclipse, with more than 90% of the sun covered in many western cities. Although the eclipse will never become total, it will still be an impressive sight, though solar eclipse glasses will be required throughout the event. Here are the times of maximum eclipse in some major cities:

• Madrid: 8:32 p.m. CEST (99.9%)
• Barcelona: 8:29 p.m. CEST (99.8%)
• Algiers, Algeria: 7:33 p.m. CET (96%)
• Nice, France: 8:24 p.m. CEST (95%)
• Lisbon, Portugal: 7:36 p.m. WEST (94%)
• Dublin, Ireland: 7:10 p.m. BST (94%)
• Cardiff, Wales: 7:13 p.m. BST (93%)
• Belfast, Northern Ireland: 7:08 p.m. BST (93%)
• Paris: 8:17 p.m. CEST (92%)
• Tangier, Morocco: 7:40 p.m. WEST (92%)
• London: 7:13 p.m. BST (91%)
• Edinburgh, Scotland: 7:05 p.m. BST (91% eclipse)

To check exactly what you'll see and when, enter your location on an interactive map of the eclipse, which will give you a schedule for when the eclipse begins, peaks and ends where you are.

New images captured by the world's most powerful solar telescope have revealed something that was hiding in plain sight on the sun for 150 years: thousands of tiny whirlpools twisting across our star's surface. The ultra-detailed observations could help to explain some of the sun's most violent behavior as well as hint at the answer to a long-standing solar mystery.

The new time-lapse footage offers the first direct proof of a long-predicted phenomenon called Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. The effect itself isn't new to science; it's named for physicists Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz, who described it in the 19th century. The physicists found that whenever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, the friction between them, or shear, rolls into spiraling patterns. However, this is the first time this effect has been seen on the sun, where that shear plays out between neighboring streams of solar plasma.

Researchers captured the swirls using the U.S. National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii and then compared the images against computer simulations of the sun's visible surface, called the photosphere. The findings were published Aug. 5 in the journal Nature.

The resulting time-lapse footage from the telescope is unlike anything solar physicists have captured before. It shows dozens of tiny vortices clustering along the edges of magnetic regions, some accompanied by delicate, dark stripes known as striations, according to a statement from the National Science Foundation. The telescope's resolution is sharp enough to pick out structures just tens of miles across — a scale so fine that the vortices had gone completely undetected until now.

When the researchers lined the images up against their simulations, the match was close enough ‪—‬ down to the average spacing between vortices ‪—‬ to confirm that they'd finally caught the instability in action.

Beyond the impressive visuals, researchers think these swirls may serve an important function. By constantly twisting and mixing the sun's magnetic-field lines, these vortices may play a part in building up the energy behind solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

The effect also might help to explain the long-standing mystery of why the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, reaches temperatures of around 2 million degrees Fahrenheit (around 1 million degrees Celsius) while its surface remains hundreds of thousands of degrees cooler, Thomas Rimmele, chief technologist at the National Solar Observatory, said in the statement.

The team now plans to use computer programs to automatically track these vortices across future observations. This will help them measure exactly how much these swirls contribute to heating the corona and driving the explosive space weather that can disrupt satellites, communications and power grids on Earth.

See how much you know about the sun with our sun quiz!

Every total solar eclipse travels from west to east, because the moon and Earth move in the same direction — counterclockwise, or from west to east. Earth rotates eastward once every 24 hours, and the moon also travels eastward as it orbits our planet. Because the moon's shadow moves across Earth faster than the planet rotates beneath it, the path of totality (the route of the moon's umbra, the darkest part of its inner shadow) always sweeps from west to east.

But if you've looked at maps of the Aug. 12, 2026, total solar eclipse, you may have noticed something puzzling. At first glance, the eclipse appears to do the exact opposite. The path seems to begin in far northern Siberia, near the North Pole, before heading toward eastern Greenland, making it look as though the moon's shadow were traveling from east to west. It then appears to curve over western Iceland and northern Spain. So what's going on?

The apparent reversal from Siberia to Greenland is an illusion. It's created by geometry, but it's also a result of viewing the eclipse on a flat map instead of on a globe. The moon's shadow follows a smooth arc across Earth's curved surface and never changes direction, as shown by this animation. This eclipse passes so close to the North Pole that the distortion caused by map projections makes the track appear to bend back on itself, when in reality, the shadow is simply sweeping over the top of the world.

"The path of this eclipse also has a strong north-south component, the combined effect of Earth's rotation and the tilt of both Earth's axis and the Moon's orbit," experts at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio explained. "Combined with Earth's rotation, the umbra's eastern motion during the first half of its travel is effectively canceled out."

This causes the shadow to sweep over the Arctic in a broad curve, instead of following the more familiar west-to-east path. On a flat map, that curved route can make it look as though the eclipse briefly reverses direction, even though it never actually does.

The moon's shadow has two parts — the narrow umbra, where observers experience totality, and the much broader penumbra, where only a partial eclipse is visible. The widths of these shadows depend on the moon's distance from Earth, while their speed is influenced by the moon's orbit, Earth's rotation and the geometry of the eclipse.

If you are among the millions of people who will be in the moon's penumbra on Aug. 12, make sure to always wear a pair of certified solar eclipse glasses (or use a solar filter on your telescope or binoculars) to view the partial eclipse. It is never safe to look directly at the sun, except during the moment of totality, when the sun is 100% covered.

If you aren't in the right spot for the total solar eclipse, fear not. A near-total lunar eclipse will be visible over most of North America just two weeks later, and there are plenty of other summer skywatching highlights to watch for.