2026 Total Solar Eclipse: Filming the Moon’s Shadow from the Stratosphere

Today, 12 of August 2026, the Moon’s shadow will sweep across the northern hemisphere in one of the year’s most anticipated astronomical events.

The path of totality crosses eastern Greenland, western Iceland, northern Spain and a small corner of northeastern Portugal. Across much of the rest of Europe, including the UK, the Sun will be partially eclipsed. For Western Europe, it is a particularly rare event: the first total solar eclipse to reach the mainland since 1999.

From the ground, totality offers a remarkable view of the Sun disappearing behind the Moon. From the stratosphere, however, an eclipse becomes something else entirely. Instead of simply looking upwards at the obscured Sun, it becomes possible to look across the curvature of the Earth and watch the Moon’s enormous shadow move across the planet.

We know because, in 2017, we went to Wyoming to film exactly that.

What is a solar eclipse?

A solar eclipse happens when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, blocking some or all of the Sun from view.

During a solar eclipse, the Moon casts a broad partial shadow, the penumbra, and a much smaller central shadow called the umbra. If the umbra passes over you, the Sun is completely covered and you experience totality.

Today, the umbra crosses Greenland, Iceland, northern Spain and a small part of Portugal. The UK lies just outside it, so we will see a deep partial eclipse instead. Across Britain, the eclipse begins shortly after 6pm BST and reaches maximum at around 7.10pm, obscuring roughly 91% of the Sun’s disc.

This distinction is particularly relevant to our 2017 BBC Earth project, when our cameras captured the umbra itself moving across the Earth from the stratosphere.

Capturing an eclipse for BBC Earth

On 21 August 2017, a total solar eclipse crossed the United States from coast to coast. Working with BBC Studios for its Earth From Space series, our team travelled to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, with the aim of capturing the event from the upper stratosphere.

The challenge was to create a complete 360° view. We built a bespoke spacecraft carrying six precisely aligned cameras, synchronised using a custom timing control system so that their footage could later be combined into a single spherical image.

There was also a deadline that could not move.

Totality over our launch site began at 11:21am, so the spacecraft had to leave the ground at precisely the right time to reach its target altitude as the Moon’s shadow arrived. After preparing the flight systems in the shelter of a hangar due to gusting surface winds, we launched at 9:55am.

Watching the Moon’s shadow arrive

As the eclipse approached, the cameras recorded more than just the changing light.

The spacecraft experienced an increase in turbulence as the Moon’s shadow moved towards it. Our team attributed this to atmospheric disturbances associated with the rapid temperature change created by the advancing shadow. Within minutes, the spacecraft was engulfed by it before emerging back into sunlight.

The resulting perspective makes the scale of an eclipse much easier to understand. From altitude, the event is no longer simply the Moon passing across the Sun. The shadow itself becomes visible as a vast region of darkness travelling across the Earth beneath the cameras.

The flight ultimately continued beyond 50km altitude before descending for recovery.

Data collected during the mission also contributed to research by the Montana Space Grant Consortium into stratospheric gravity waves, adding a scientific result to what had begun primarily as an ambitious filming project.

Turning six cameras into one view

Capturing the footage was only half the job.

In 2017, producing high-quality 360° video from six independent cameras required an enormous amount of post-production. Every view needed to be aligned and stitched together manually, frame by frame, to create the finished film.

The process took hundreds of hours of editing. Advances in camera systems and stitching technology have since made this kind of production considerably more efficient, but at the time it represented a technically demanding approach to immersive filmmaking.

The finished footage was published by BBC Earth, giving viewers the ability to look around the stratosphere as the eclipse unfolded rather than experiencing it through a fixed camera angle.

A different way to observe astronomical events

Near Space provides an unusual meeting point between aerospace engineering, cinematography and scientific observation.

An astronomical event familiar from the ground can look entirely different when viewed above most of the atmosphere. For an eclipse, that means revealing not only what is happening in the sky, but what the event is doing to the Earth and atmosphere below.

Today’s eclipse is another reminder of what there is still to capture. With increasingly capable high-resolution cameras, stabilisation systems, 360° imaging and immersive formats, future eclipse missions could record these fleeting events with a level of detail that was extremely difficult when we launched from Wyoming nine years ago.

The celestial mechanics have not changed. What we can build, fly and film with certainly has.

If you have an astronomical event, scientific project or an ambition to film in space that needs a perspective the ground cannot provide, talk to our team about capturing it from Near Space.