He total solar eclipse of the next August 12 It will be the first visible from the Iberian Peninsula in more than a century. The strip of totality will cross Spain from west to east and will cover a good part of the northern half of the peninsula, in addition to reaching Balearics. In the rest of the country the eclipse will be partial. Everything will happen at sunset, when the Sun is already very close to the horizon.
All the limelight is being taken by the experience that those who can see the eclipse in its entirety will have, but Outside of it there will also be the opportunity to contemplate a phenomenon called ‘moon shadows’.small crescent shapes that can appear in hundreds on the ground under trees. Despite their name, they are not really shadows cast by our satellite, but rather tiny images of the Sun itself while a part of its disk remains hidden by the Moon.
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The small spaces between the leaves function in a similar way to the hole of a pinhole camera. Each one lets a narrow beam of light pass through and projects an image of the Sun onto the ground. On a normal day, these small gaps project tiny round images onto the ground because the Sun looks like a complete disk.
During a partial eclipse, The Moon covers a part of that disk and each gap reproduces exactly that new shape. That’s why the circles of light transform in small crescentseach a miniature image of the eclipsed Sun.
During a solar eclipse, the gaps between leaves on trees act as multiple pinhole cameras,
and each gap projects its own crescent-shaped image of the eclipsed sun onto the ground.
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The fact that this phenomenon occurs during the partial phases of the eclipse will allow you to observe the ‘moon shadows’ throughout Spainas long as the sky is clear and the small images of the Sun can be projected with sufficient contrast onto the ground, a wall or other surface.
In the southern half of the peninsula and in Canary Islandswhere the eclipse will be partial, they may appear as the concealment progresses. In the areas crossed by the strip of totality the same thing will happen before the Moon completely covers the Sun and will be appreciated again after. During totality the projection is too faint to be visible.
The very low position of the Sun during the Spanish eclipse will also force us to look for places with the western horizon clear. Under these conditions, trees, bushes and other objects with small gaps may become the ground or a wall. on a surface covered by dozens of small crescent-shaped suns.