12 August 2026 · 🔭 Astronomy

Seven degrees above the sea – the solar eclipse from the beach at Tversted

Usually I look through a telescope 8,500 kilometres away. This evening I stood in the sand at Tversted on the Danish Skagerrak coast with my family, looking up through a pair of cardboard glasses.

It was better.

19:06

first contact

20:00

maximum, 83.5 % covered

20:52

last contact

Where this was

Map of the northern tip of Jutland with Tversted between Hirtshals and Skagen, plus the line of sight at 286° WNW across the Skagerrak — Tversted sits on the north coast of Jutland, 16 km east of Hirtshals and 29 km short of Skagen. The coast faces north – the Sun stood west-north-west, out over the water.

Worked out beforehand

I built this simulation to prepare my family for the eclipse.

Simulation of the eclipse for Tversted at maximum: 20:00, 83.5 % obscuration, magnitude 0.864, altitude 7.5°, azimuth 286° — The simulation for Tversted, as a still at maximum – one click plays the whole run. The readouts are German: *Uhrzeit* = time · *Bedeckung* = obscuration · *Größe* = magnitude · *Höhe* = altitude · *Azimut* = azimuth.

The number that matters in it is not the obscuration but the altitude: 7.5 degrees. That is how low the Sun stood at maximum. Which is exactly why the beach was the right place – a line of trees or a dune to the west would have been enough to cost us the whole evening. By last contact at 20:52 the Sun was still one degree above the horizon; a quarter of an hour later it set.

What there was to see

The eclipse began at 19:06 and ended at 20:52. At the 20:00 maximum, 83.5 per cent of the Sun's disc was covered by the Moon.

Thin cloud drifted through all evening, and a few times it looked as though nothing would come of it. The crucial half hour around maximum happened to be clear. That was luck, not planning.

The beach at Tversted on the evening of 12 August 2026: two onlookers wearing eclipse glasses, with more people and parked cars along the dunes behind them — 20:04, three minutes after maximum. We were not the only ones with the idea.

Incidentally, at 83 per cent it does not go dark. What is left of the Sun is still far too bright to look at, and the eye compensates for almost all the rest. The photograph shows it well: a warm summer evening by the sea, three minutes after maximum. Without the glasses you would barely have noticed the difference.

The photographs

I took the photographs with my phone at five times zoom and the Bresser eclipse glasses simply held in front of the lens. That is not technique, it is improvisation – and it is exactly why it works: the filter sits in front of the objective, so the phone sees the Sun and nothing else.

The Sun with a notch bitten out of its upper right edge, about a third covered — **19:30** – the Moon pushes in from the upper right, about a third of the Sun's disc is gone.

A narrow solar crescent just before maximum, photographed through thin cloud — **20:00:28** – half a minute before maximum. The orange haze around it is the cloud it only just came through.

The solar crescent a few minutes after maximum — **20:06** – on the way back already.

Photographs of this kind follow the same rule as looking does: never without a filter, and the filter belongs in front of the optics, not behind them. A phone will forgive you; an eye will not.

Totality itself passed elsewhere – over north-east Greenland, then western Iceland, and a few minutes after our maximum over northern Spain. There the Sun was gone completely for about a minute and a half. Here it was a crescent over the water, with children next to me taking their glasses off every few minutes to check whether you can see it without them after all.

You cannot.

🔭 The contrast, on the very same night: The first session with Astro PM → · The rig that ran on its own while I was away: My rig @ Starfront in Texas · My images: Astro Image Showcase