The eclipse over Germany: 90 per cent — and the next one is in 2075

Just after eight last night, across half of Germany, people stood on balconies, field paths and car parks looking the same way. The sun sat low and orange, and a piece of it was missing. Up to 90 per cent of it, in fact.

Anyone who saw it will remember it. Anyone who missed it has a long wait — and that is really what this piece is about.

What was actually visible on 12 August 2026

It was a **partial** eclipse. The moon's umbra — the narrow band where daylight turns to night — crossed Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain. Germany sat beside it, close enough for something remarkable but not for the real thing.

Maximum coverage came at about 20:16 CEST — shortly before sunset. That is why yesterday's photographs look so unusual: not a hard crescent in a midday sky, but a bitten-into sun sitting low over the horizon.

When is the next one?

This is where it gets uncomfortably specific. Germany will not see coverage of up to 90 per cent again until **13 July 2075**.

A *total* eclipse, the kind where it genuinely goes dark, is further off still. For most of us that means one thing: if you want totality, you travel to it. It does not come to you.

Canada had in 2024 what Germany narrowly missed yesterday

On 8 April 2024 the umbra crossed eastern Canada — Ontario, Québec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island. And right at the end, across the northern tip of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

At Meat Cove, the last place the road reaches, it went dark at 4:39pm Atlantic Time for one minute and thirty seconds. The rest of Nova Scotia saw around 95 per cent.

And the next totality over Nova Scotia?

1 May 2079. So the same rule applies here: the umbra is a rare visitor, everywhere on earth.

What Nova Scotia offers instead, on any clear evening, is less spectacular and far more dependable: a sky where the Milky Way is visible to the naked eye, because there is a great deal of forest between the coast and the nearest serious glow.

If you photographed it

• Solar filters go in front of the lens, never behind it — low sun included
• Eclipse glasses are not a camera filter, and a camera filter is not eye protection
• Frames with a foreground — a church spire, a treeline, the horizon — age better than bare telephoto shots
• Note the place and the time while you still remember them

And if you simply stood there with a pair of eclipse glasses and no camera: that was probably the better call.