Put your phone in your pocket. It will tell you when to look, what to look for, and when the good bits are. Keep this page open and your volume up.
Pulling the hour-by-hour cloud forecast for your exact spot.
Cloudy? Find clearer sky near you →Your town, your times, your coverage, drawn from the real geometry — ready to post.
Do not point a phone, camera or binoculars at the Sun without a proper solar filter over the front. Sensors burn, and so do eyes at a viewfinder.
No filter? Shoot everything else. The crescents under a tree. The flat metallic light on buildings. Faces in the crowd. Your shadow with a hard edge on one side. These are the photos people remember, and they need no filter at all.
The safe trick: hold your eclipse glasses flat over the phone lens and tap to focus. It works, and it costs nothing.
ISO 12312-2 is the international safety standard for solar viewers — real eclipse glasses have that exact code printed on the frame. No code printed on them, don't use them.
Not sunglasses. Not a phone screen. Not smoked glass, welding glass under shade 14, or an exposed negative. A deep partial eclipse is still full-strength sunlight, and retinal damage is painless and permanent — your eye has no pain nerves inside, so you'd feel nothing while it happened.
Check your glasses for scratches or pinholes against a bright lamp first. If light gets through anywhere, bin them.
No glasses? A pinhole projector works perfectly, and so does standing under a leafy tree. You lose nothing — the crescents on the ground are the best part anyway.
The eclipse is the middle act. There are two others, and they're free.
Six planets before dawn. Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Uranus, Saturn and Neptune strung across the sky from the east round to the south-west. Jupiter, Mars, Mercury and Saturn are naked-eye; the other two need binoculars.
The Perseids peak the same night — and the New Moon falls on 12 August, so there's no moonlight to wash them out. Under a dark sky that's often 80 or more meteors an hour. Get away from streetlights, lie back, and give your eyes twenty minutes to adjust. No equipment, no filter, no skill required.
Southern Spain, North Africa and Egypt. One of the longest totalities of the century — totality meaning the Moon covers the whole Sun, not most of it. A completely different thing to a partial: you see the corona (the Sun's wispy outer atmosphere, a white halo that's invisible at any other time), day drops into night, and the temperature crashes. Worth planning a year out.
Partial eclipse — the Moon covers part of the Sun. That's what the UK gets: the Sun becomes a thin crescent, but never fully disappears.
First contact — the exact moment the Moon's edge first touches the Sun. The "first bite".
Deepest point / maximum — the moment the most Sun is hidden. Everything on this page counts down to it.
Totality — when the Moon covers the whole Sun. Not here this time — you'd need to be in Spain. Day briefly turns to night.
"Sun 14° up" — how high it sits in the sky. Handy trick: your fist at arm's length covers about 10°, so 14° is barely a fist and a half above the rooftops. That's why open ground with a clear view matters more than a cloudless sky overhead.
"Look W · 275°" — which way to face. W is west — roughly where the Sun sets. The number is the exact compass bearing if you open your phone's compass app.
New Moon — when the Moon sits between us and the Sun with its unlit side facing us. Fun fact: an eclipse is a New Moon, just one that lines up perfectly.
The Perseids — a meteor shower: streaks of light ("shooting stars") from comet dust burning up in our atmosphere. The radiant is the point they all seem to stream out from — the higher it climbs, the more you see, which is why the best hours are before dawn.
This page is free, has no ads and no tracking, and was built by one person in Scotland. If it made your eclipse better, you can buy me a coffee — entirely optional, and it keeps the next one free too.