The Moon's shadow on Earth captured by the European satellite MTG-I1

The European Space Agency has released images of the total solar eclipse taken from space. An animation from the Meteosat Third Generation Imager satellite, known as MTG-I1, shows the Moon's shadow cone advancing across the Earth's surface and tracing the band of totality, the strip within which the Sun was completely covered.

The satellite observes from a geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometres up and keeps its instruments pointed steadily at Europe and North Africa. This fixed position makes it possible to follow the shadow's movement without changing the framing, which is why the footage renders the motion continuously.

In the animation the shadow crosses Greenland and Iceland first, then north-eastern Portugal and finally Spain.

A phenomenon seen from very far away

In continental Europe totality lasted only a few minutes. The partial eclipse, by contrast, was visible across a far wider area: from northern Canada through the Nordic countries to the west coast of Africa and further south, in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Ticino lay outside the band of totality. As il Cantonale reported in advance, the Sun was only partly covered in the canton, with the maximum occurring when it was already low on the horizon.

Footage from space conveys a dimension that cannot be perceived from the ground. Anyone standing under the shadow sees the sky darken within moments but cannot make out the shape or the speed of the patch moving across the planet.