The Moon Swallowed the Sun: When a Childhood Fascination Became Reality

Before Palencia, there was the night sky

My relationship with astronomy did not begin in a laboratory, beside a telescope, or during a scientific campaign. It began much more simply: by looking at the sky.

In Palencia, the distance between knowledge and wonder finally closed.

Since childhood, I have been fascinated by the stars that appear after sunset and by the questions that emerge when we look beyond the familiar world around us. What were those distant points of light? How far away were they? How could celestial bodies move through space while appearing almost motionless to an observer on Earth?

These questions gradually became a reason to read, search, and learn. Books introduced me to planets, stars, galaxies, and the physical laws that govern the universe. Every answer opened another question, and the more I learned, the more I realised how much remained unknown to me.

What fascinated me most was the relationship between appearance and reality. A star may look like a tiny point of light while being vastly larger than our planet. The Moon may seem close enough to touch, yet it is about 384,400 kilometres from Earth on average. Astronomy taught me that what we see is only the beginning of what we can understand.

For years, my relationship with the universe was built through observation, reading, and imagination. I could study celestial movements and understand their scientific explanations. But there was still a difference between knowing how the universe works and witnessing one of its most remarkable events directly.

Palencia, 12 August 2026

That difference disappeared in Palencia. I was there as a student selected for the Morocco Eclipse 2026–2027 project, and one of my tasks was to prepare the solar filters of our telescopes.

It sounds like a small job, but it carried a real weight. Pointing a telescope at the Sun without a proper filter is dangerous, so I checked each filter carefully, again and again, because I wanted everything to be perfect. I had waited for this day for years, and I did not want a single detail to go wrong.

A few minutes before first contact, I put on my eclipse glasses. My heart was beating faster than usual. I was excited, almost impatient, and at the same time a little nervous, like someone waiting for a moment that cannot be repeated. I kept looking up at the Sun, searching for the first sign of the Moon.

Then it came. At first contact, the Moon touched the edge of the Sun and left a tiny notch, so small that I almost doubted what I saw. But I smiled behind my glasses. That small dark bite meant that the sky I had dreamed about since childhood was finally doing what I had only read about.

The long approach

The partial phase began, and for nearly an hour the Sun became a thinner and thinner crescent. The glasses and the telescope filters stayed on, because the Sun remains dangerous to look at until the very moment of totality.

I felt two things at once: patience and impatience. I knew exactly what was happening, because I had studied it many times. Yet knowing did not calm me. Each minute made the crescent thinner and my excitement stronger. The filters I had prepared were now doing their job, and I felt proud to be part of the mission.

The last seconds and totality

The final moments before totality went very fast. Sunlight squeezed through the valleys on the Moon’s edge and broke into bright dots called Baily’s beads. Then a single point remained, the diamond ring, and then it was gone.

That was second contact, and I was suddenly looking at something I had no words for. The corona appeared around a black disc, and for 1 minute and 42 seconds, everything was different. It is only during totality that it is safe to look without protection, so I took off my glasses and saw the Sun’s outer atmosphere with my own eyes, not through a screen or a photograph.

I knew how short that time was, and it made every second feel enormous. I did not want to blink. All the books, all the questions, all the nights spent looking at the stars seemed to lead to those 102 seconds. Scientists wait for this moment because totality is the only time the corona can be studied from the ground. For me, it was also the moment when a childhood dream became real.

When the first direct light returned at third contact, it felt like waking up from a dream I wished could last longer. The sequence then ran in reverse until the Moon left the Sun completely at fourth contact.

What changed for me

I had always known that the Moon does not change phase during an eclipse: it is New Moon the whole time, and only the part of the Sun it hides changes. But knowing this and watching the Sun disappear behind it are two very different things. In Palencia, the distance between knowledge and wonder finally closed.

The whole eclipse lasted 1 hour and 49 minutes from first to fourth contact, and our photo sequence puts it all into one image, from the full Sun to the corona and back. When I look at it now, I do not only see an astronomical event. I see the moment I stopped only reading about the universe and finally stood inside one of its most beautiful events.

Palencia was the first step. Next is Morocco in 2027, and I hope to be there too.