If you were lucky enough to witness the total solar eclipse that crossed North America in April 2024, you probably haven’t forgotten the experience. As the Moon completely covered the Sun, daytime briefly gave way to twilight and the Sun’s delicate corona – a ghostly halo of plasma normally outshined by the Sun’s intense light – suddenly came into view.
On August 12, 2026, another solar eclipse will grace our skies. This time, the Moon’s shadow will follow a narrow path across Greenland, Iceland, northern Spain and parts of Russia, where observers will once again experience totality. Across Canada, the eclipse will be visible as a partial solar eclipse, with the amount of the Sun covered varying by location: from about 30% in Montréal to roughly 61% in Iqaluit. Even without totality, it will be an excellent opportunity to safely observe one of astronomy’s most captivating celestial events and watch the Moon take a “bite” out of the Sun!
The total solar eclipse of 2024 and the upcoming eclipse in 2026 have one thing in common: they are both the result of a remarkable celestial alignment, with the Moon passing directly between Earth and the Sun. But Earth isn’t the only world where eclipses happen.
Throughout the Solar System, moons pass in front of the Sun, creating eclipse experiences unlike anything we see on Earth. Why? Geometry. The size of a moon, its distance from its planet and the Sun, and the orientation of their orbits all shape what an observer would see.
So, what would a solar eclipse look like from Mars? Or Jupiter? Or beneath Saturn’s magnificent rings? Let’s take a tour of the Solar System and find out.
A solar eclipse occurs when a moon passes between a planet and its star, temporarily blocking some or all of the star’s light from reaching the planet.
Here on Earth, the Moon’s shadow has two main parts. Observers standing within the darkest region – the umbra – experience a total solar eclipse, while those in the surrounding penumbra see a partial eclipse as only part of the Sun appears obscured.
A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes directly between the Sun and Earth, casting its shadow (the umbra and penumbra) onto Earth’s surface and temporarily blocking the Sun for observers within that shadow. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Depending on the precise geometry of the alignment, solar eclipses are classified into types:
Solar eclipses are fairly common. Between two to five events occur somewhere on Earth every year. The reason most of us experience so few is that the Moon’s shadow is only cast along a narrow strip of Earth’s surface. While a partial eclipse can be visible over thousands of kilometres, totality is confined to a much smaller path. As a result, the average location on Earth experiences a total solar eclipse only about once every 400 years.
Earth’s total solar eclipses owe their beauty to an extraordinary cosmic coincidence. The Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon but it is also about 400 times farther away. Those two numbers almost perfectly cancel out, making the Sun and Moon appear nearly the same size in our sky.
During a total solar eclipse, the Moon completely blocks the Sun’s bright disk, revealing features normally hidden from view. In this image of the August 11, 1999 eclipse, red solar prominences are visible along the Sun’s edge, surrounded by the faint, extended corona and its sweeping coronal streamers. Image: Luc Viatour.
That perfect match allows the Moon to completely cover the Sun’s bright surface while leaving the much fainter corona visible around its edge. It’s a remarkable alignment that makes total solar eclipses one of the most breathtaking astronomical events we can witness.
But change the geometry, even slightly, and the eclipse changes too. The same simple phenomenon, a moon passing in front of its star, can therefore produce dramatically different views across the Solar System.
Curious how changing a moon’s size or orbit transforms an eclipse? Explore different eclipse geometries with the MinuteLabs Eclipse Explorer before we begin our tour of the Solar System.
The “Red Planet” has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos. Neither is large enough to completely cover the Sun, so a Martian observer would never experience the kind of dramatic total solar eclipse we’re familiar with.
Instead, the larger moon, Phobos, races across the Sun as an irregular, potato-shaped silhouette, producing a brief partial eclipse. The smaller Deimos appears as little more than a dark dot drifting across the Sun’s face. These aren’t just artists’ impressions. NASA’s Mars rovers (including Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance) have photographed these eclipses directly from the Martian surface, giving us our first views of solar eclipses from another planet. Check out a video from Perseverance here:
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Sees Solar Eclipse on Mars
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z camera system to shoot video of Phobos, one of Mars’ two moons, eclipsing the Sun. It’s the most zoomed-in, highest frame-rate observation of a Phobos solar eclipse ever taken from the Martian surface. Several Mars rovers have observed Phobos crossing in front of the Sun over the past 18 years.
For planetary scientists, these fleeting alignments are more than fun events. By precisely measuring when Phobos crosses the Sun, researchers can track subtle changes in its orbit and better understand how the Mars-Phobos system evolves over time.
Earth’s total eclipses may be more dramatic, but Mars reminds us that even a partial eclipse can reveal important science.
Now travel five times farther from the Sun to Jupiter. With over a hundred known moons, Jupiter is arguably the Solar System’s eclipse champion. Its four largest moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, are all large enough to cast enormous shadows across the giant planet’s cloud tops. Unlike Earth, where a total solar eclipse is a rare event for any one location, eclipses on Jupiter happen constantly.
Io’s shadow sweeps across Jupiter’s cloud tops in this striking view from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Anyone standing within the dark spot would witness a total solar eclipse as Io passes in front of the Sun. Because Jupiter’s many moons orbit close to the planet’s equatorial plane, eclipses like this occur regularly throughout the Jovian year. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill (CC BY).
Imagine hovering high above Jupiter’s colourful clouds. As one moon slides in front of the distant Sun, a perfectly round shadow races across the swirling atmosphere below. Sometimes, two or even three moons cast their shadows at the same time, creating a celestial dance that has been photographed by both the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Juno spacecraft.
Of course, “hovering” is the closest we can get. Jupiter is a gas giant with no solid surface to stand on. Beneath its colourful cloud tops, the atmosphere becomes hotter, denser and more hostile with depth. Hurricane-force winds sweep through the atmosphere, and storms thousands of kilometres across (such as the Great Red Spot) have raged for centuries.
If Jupiter offers some of the Solar System’s most spectacular eclipses, it also offers one of its least hospitable places to watch them!
If Jupiter is the eclipse champion, Saturn may provide the most spectacular scenery. Like Jupiter, Saturn is a gas giant, so any eclipse would have to be imagined from a spacecraft or a balloon floating high in its upper atmosphere. But the view would be extraordinary.
This stunning image shows a solar eclipse by Saturn, with the planet passing directly in front of the Sun as seen by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The backlit geometry causes Saturn’s rings and atmosphere to glow, while a tiny blue dot just beyond the rings reveals Earth, seen from nearly 1.5 billion kilometres away. Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.
More than one hundred known moons orbit Saturn, and many are capable of passing between the planet and the Sun. Their shadows sweep across Saturn’s golden cloud tops while, overhead, the planet’s magnificent rings dominate the sky. Those rings create a shadow show of their own. As Saturn orbits the Sun, the rings cast enormous shadows across the planet, while Saturn itself can cast its shadow across the rings. Near Saturn’s equinoxes, when sunlight strikes the rings edge-on, these shifting patterns become especially striking.
Nowhere else in the Solar System combines eclipses, moon shadows and a ring system into such a spectacular display. If Earth offers the most famous eclipses, Saturn may offer the most beautiful backdrop. Try using the Eclipse Explorer to simulate this experience!
Our final stop takes us to the Solar System’s ice giants. Like Jupiter and Saturn, both Uranus and Neptune have rings and families of moons capable of producing solar eclipses. But here, the geometry becomes much more complicated.
Uranus is unlike any other planet in the Solar System. Instead of spinning “upright” like Earth, it rotates on its side, with its rotation axis tilted by about 98 degrees. Its moons orbit close to the planet’s equator, so for most of Uranus’s 84-year journey around the Sun, they pass above or below the Sun from the planet’s perspective rather than directly in front of it.
This James Webb Space Telescope image reveals Uranus’s delicate rings in remarkable detail. Unlike the other giant planets, Uranus rotates on its side, with its entire planetary system tilted by about 98°, giving it some of the most unusual seasons – and eclipse geometry – in the Solar System. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI).
Only around Uranus’s equinoxes (when the Sun crosses the planet’s equatorial plane) does the alignment become favourable for the moons to cast their shadows onto the planet. Because Uranus takes 84 Earth years to complete one orbit, these eclipse seasons occur only about once every 42 years. So on Uranus, eclipses are rare not because the planet lacks moons, but because the geometry is rarely just right. It’s a striking reminder that having many moons isn’t enough. The architecture of an entire planetary system determines whether eclipses happen at all.
Neptune, meanwhile, presents a different story. Although its large moon Triton can easily produce total solar eclipses, the planet lacks the dramatic ring system of Saturn or the frequent multiple shadow transits seen on Jupiter. Instead, Neptune reminds us that as you travel farther from the Sun, the Sun itself becomes a much smaller (and easier!) target to eclipse.
Eclipses aren’t just beautiful, they’re also powerful scientific tools. The same geometry that produces a solar eclipse in our Solar System allows astronomers (including many here at IREx) to discover planets orbiting distant stars.
When an exoplanet passes in front of its host star, it blocks a tiny fraction of the starlight, causing the star to dim ever so slightly. These events are called transits, and by measuring these tiny dips in brightness, astronomers can determine a planet’s size, orbital period and, in some cases, even study the composition of its atmosphere.
An animation of a transit of a small rocky planet followed by a transit of a gas giant planet. The light curves appear at the bottom of the animation. The horizontal axis represents time, the vertical axis represents the brightness of the star. Credit: NASA GSFC
In a sense, every exoplanet discovered using the transit method is another reminder that eclipses are far more than beautiful celestial spectacles – they are one of astronomy’s most powerful investigative tools.
There’s another reason to appreciate Earth’s total solar eclipses: they won’t last forever.
The Moon is slowly drifting away from Earth in a process known as lunar recession. Driven by tidal interactions between Earth and the Moon, this process causes the Moon’s orbit to expand by about 3.8 centimetres every year. This is about the same rate that our fingernails grow!
That may seem insignificant, but over hundreds of millions of years it makes a profound difference. As the Moon moves farther away, it appears slightly smaller in our sky. Eventually, it will no longer be large enough to completely cover the Sun, even when it is closest to Earth. When that happens, total solar eclipses will disappear. Future observers on Earth will see only annular eclipses when the Moon passes in front of the Sun.
Based on our current understanding of the Earth-Moon system, this transition is expected to occur in a little over 600 million years, although the exact timing depends not only on the Moon’s changing orbit but also on the gradual evolution of the Sun itself.
It’s a humbling thought. The breathtaking eclipse visible from Earth this August is possible because of a remarkable coincidence: the Moon and Sun happen to appear almost exactly the same size in our sky. That coincidence has existed for only a portion of Earth’s history, and it won’t last forever. We’re fortunate to be living during the brief cosmic moment when total solar eclipses are possible.
So when the Moon slides across the face of the Sun on August 12, remember that you’re witnessing more than one of nature’s most spectacular displays. You’re witnessing a phenomenon shaped by billions of years of planetary evolution: a fleeting alignment of worlds that future generations, hundreds of millions of years from now, will never see. So enjoy the view!
Ready to become an eclipse expert? Put your new knowledge to the test with the MinuteLabs Eclipse Explorer. Compare eclipse views from every planet in the Solar System, experiment with different moon and Sun sizes, and discover how changing just one piece of the celestial geometry can transform a total eclipse into an annular or partial one.
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