What you actually see during 4 minutes and 48 seconds of totality

Everybody who has seen a total eclipse says the same two things: that photographs look nothing like it, and that the first time round they missed most of it because they were looking the wrong way. With almost five minutes, Ceuta gives you room to do it properly. What follows is meant to be read beforehand, not during.

The ten minutes before: the light turns strange

With 90 % of the disc covered it is still daylight, but the light is no longer normal. The Sun has become an almost point-like source, so shadows sharpen in a way you never otherwise see: the edge of a leaf projects crisply onto the ground. The temperature starts to drop. Under trees, the patches of light coming through the leaves stop being round and turn into crescents — the bitten Sun, projected hundreds of times over.

One minute before: look west, and look down

• To the west, over the sea, you can watch the shadow coming: a wall of darkness closing at over 2,000 km/h. From Ceuta, with an open sea horizon, you are in one of the best possible places to see it arrive.
• On pale ground — a white wall, a sheet, sand — shadow bands may appear: faint, fast ripples, like the bottom of a swimming pool. They do not always show, and many people find them the strangest part of all.
• The whole horizon turns deep orange, like twenty sunsets at once and in every direction.

The instant of C2: beads and the diamond ring

The last rays of sunlight thread through valleys on the lunar limb and break into a row of bright points: Baily's beads. They wink out one by one until a single one is left, and that point ringed by the first glow of the corona is the diamond ring. It lasts a second or two.

The corona: what you came for

The corona is the Sun's outer atmosphere, a million times fainter than the disc and therefore invisible on any other day of the year. To the naked eye it is pearly white, with plumes and filaments reaching out asymmetrically, sometimes several solar diameters. It is not a uniform halo: it has structure, and that structure differs from one eclipse to the next with the solar cycle. Watch it with the naked eye — binoculars crop it and lose the best part.

The prominences

Against the black edge of the disc you may see small tongues of intense salmon pink: prominences, arcs of plasma held up by the Sun's magnetic field. Each is several times the size of the Earth. Binoculars help here, and this is the one thing in totality they are genuinely worth using for.

And everything that is not in the sky

• Stars and planets appear. In August 2027, with the Sun in Leo, the surrounding sky looks like deep twilight.
• The temperature drops several degrees in minutes. In Ceuta, in August, mid-morning, the relief is physical.
• The wind changes. It is a real, documented effect: the breeze drops or turns as the ground stops being heated.
• The animals go quiet. Gulls settle, swifts vanish, crickets start up as though night had fallen. Plenty of people remember the silence before they remember the corona.
• People shout. Without exception. It is worth listening to.

Frequently asked questions