The European Space Agency
Total Solar Eclipse 2026 - Solar Orbiter
Solar Orbiter Plans for the 12th August 2026 Solar Eclipse
On 12 August 2026, a solar eclipse will be visible across parts of Europe and the North Atlantic. The path of totality will cross Greenland, Iceland, Spain and a small area of northeastern Portugal. Other parts of Europe will see a partial solar eclipse.
This page gathers observations from instruments on board Solar Orbiter, and shows how these are used by the community to predict the state of the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona.
What will Solar Orbiter do in the days leading up to the eclipse?
Dedicated remote-sensing observations (the "Remote-Sensing Windows", RSWs) are planned to start on 9 August 2026. More detail on RSW activities is available here.
Ahead of this period, Solar Orbiter's remote-sensing instruments (EUI, PHI, Metis) are taking images of the Sun's atmosphere as part of a synoptic observing programme. The latest available data from each instrument team is shown below.
Latest EUI/FSI data
Latest PHI data
Latest Metis data
! Metis data will be updated in the upcoming days, the present images date back to May 2026.
What will Solar Orbiter do on the day of the eclipse?
On 12 August, EUI, PHI, Metis and SPICE will all be observing, with a disk-center pointing. The planned Solar Orbiter Observing Plans are Eruption Watch, Density Fluctuations, and Coronal Hole Boundary Expansion.
| Metis | Visible-light polarized brightness and UV images every 6 min |
| EUI / Full Sun Imager | Images (174 Å and 304 Å) every 6 min |
| SPICE | Composition raster + dynamics raster (5 s exposure time), wide field of view |
| PHI / Full Disk Telescope | Acquisition every 180 min |
Predictions using Solar Orbiter data
Solar Orbiter data are used as inputs for modelling predictions of the state of the corona during the total solar eclipse. Community examples are shown below.
What will the solar corona look like during the 12th August solar eclipse? A view from SOHO/LASCO (courtesy of Adam Finley)
The LASCO-C2 coronagraph aboard SOHO gives us a sneak peek! Because the Sun rotates roughly every 27 days, we can look at previous solar rotations to anticipate the corona’s structure.
Left panels: Coronagraph views from the last two times the Sun faced Earth in the same way as it will on eclipse day (19th June & 16th July). Right panels: Images taken half a rotation later (~13.5 days), flipped left-to-right for comparison.
The view is rotated to show how the eclipse will look from the Observatorio Astrofisico de Javalambre in Teruel, Spain. The last frame of the animation corresponds to the eclipse view.
Because light scatters most efficiently from the corona at a 90° angle relative to our line of sight, structures along the solar limbs contribute the most to what we see during an eclipse. That’s why the half-rotation images give us a view of the very same slice of the corona.
To connect bright features with the Sun’s large-scale magnetic field, the coronagraph views can be combined with potential field source surface models, as shown below.
Same as above, with the PFSS model.
Thick dashed lines highlight the heliospheric current sheet, which divides outward (red) and inward (blue) magnetic fields above closed loops (white).
Small changes to the Sun's surface magnetic field push and pull current sheets and pseudo-streamers in and out of the scattering plane, drastically changing our view of the solar corona during an eclipse.
The animation includes two days of observations leading up to the eclipse view, showing how dynamic the solar corona is, however many features remain consistent. Throughout 2026, the solar corona has been dominated by a wrinkled heliospheric current sheet (quadrupolar configuration). Because this configuration has been remarkably stable, the corona during the eclipse could look very similar to these images from LASCO-C2.
Predictive Science Inc. (eclipse.predsci.com)
Solar Orbiter's PHI instrument is taking 6 Full Disk Telescope science dataset and bring them down every second day, from 1st to 11th August, that are readily processed and sent to PSI for being ingested in the prediction model.
Including the predicted Solar Orbiter view with Metis: eclipse.predsci.com/solo
HipFT model result
(SDO assimilation region, later SO view & assimilated regions indicated)
SO/Metis
K-corona brightness, radially filtered
Coconut predictions, KU Leuven (project site)
Other information
For more general information about the European eclipse, see the ESA overview page: esa.int — European solar eclipses.