A total solar eclipse will sweep across the Northern Hemisphere on Wednesday, Aug. 12, marking the first total eclipse visible from mainland Europe since 1999 and offering millions of people across multiple continents a chance to witness the moon completely block the sun.

The path of totality, the narrow band of Earth's surface where the moon fully covers the sun, stretches roughly 182 miles wide and traces an unusual route that arcs up and over the North Pole before sweeping down across the North Atlantic. Only skywatchers positioned within that narrow path will experience true totality, when day briefly turns to twilight and the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, becomes visible to the naked eye. A much broader surrounding region will instead see a partial eclipse, in which the moon takes a visible "bite" out of the sun without fully covering it.

The eclipse begins over the remote Taymyr Peninsula in Siberian Russia, an uninhabited stretch of Arctic tundra. Because the event occurs above the Arctic Circle during summer, when the sun never fully sets, totality technically begins at the unusual local time of 11:59 p.m. The path quickly exits Russian territory after this initial landfall, looping over the North Pole before continuing toward Greenland.

After crossing the Arctic Ocean, the path of totality drops onto the remote, frozen terrain of eastern Greenland. This portion of the eclipse's path passes through dramatic, largely uninhabited Arctic landscapes, offering a strikingly different viewing experience compared with the more........

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