90 days until it goes dark during the day – with the 2026 total solar eclipse
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr John Mason, eclipse chaser extraordinaire, has been studying the astronomical event on 12 August, when a total solar eclipse will sweep down from Greenland to the northern half of Spain.
While Scoresby Sound in Greenland has a high chance of clear skies due to a micro-climate, Dr Mason will be outside Burgos in northern Spain. The eclipse will be followed by the peak of the Perseid meteor shower.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 13th of May. |
| 0:10.2 | 90 days to the Total Solar Eclipse, 2026. There's only one person to speak to about this. That that is the UK's leading eclipse expert, Dr John Mason. |
| 0:26.4 | He has been witnessing total solar eclipses since the late 1980s. |
| 0:32.7 | He now guides them, and I've been talking to him about whether he's so good at them that he just turns |
| 0:40.4 | up far from the truth. Anyone who knows me and has travelled with me over the years will know |
| 0:46.7 | there's an enormous amount of preparation goes into these things, into working out where you're |
| 0:52.4 | going to go. And it's very, very hard to be certain you're going |
| 0:57.0 | to see it. Because one thing's certain. You know the eclipse has been occur. So I see the time and |
| 1:02.9 | place as predicted. But what you don't know is what sort of weather you're going to have. And the |
| 1:08.0 | real trick is to try and find place along the track where you'll get |
| 1:12.4 | reasonable or excellent weather. I think in all the years that I've been doing this, there was |
| 1:18.3 | only one totally eclipse while I was 100% certain there would be no clouds. And that was the 29th of |
| 1:25.1 | March, 2006 in the Sahara Desert. No clouds at all. I didn't |
| 1:30.7 | expect any. He didn't see any. And that's the only one I've been 100% confident. And the next one, |
| 1:36.5 | in August, I have to say, I'm not 100% confident because the weather in Spain in August |
| 1:43.7 | can be very variable. |
| 1:45.5 | And last August on the day of the eclipse, the 12th of August, the weather was notable across |
| 1:52.0 | the whole of northern Spain. |
| 1:54.0 | Thunderstorms, cloud, really, really bad. |
| 1:57.4 | Now, being the optimist that I am, I'm thinking, well, that's not going to happen this |
| 2:01.0 | year. But this one is a very difficult one. The track goes right across the earth from |
| 2:08.0 | Greenland, right the way down, just off between Iceland and Greenland, and right down the |
... |
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