{"id":71789,"date":"2026-08-13T21:38:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T21:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/?p=71789"},"modified":"2026-08-13T21:38:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T21:38:12","slug":"day-night-band-observations-of-the-total-solar-eclipse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/archives\/71789","title":{"rendered":"Day\/Night Band Observations of the Total Solar Eclipse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Eyes around the world were turned toward Greenland, Iceland, and Spain as a total solar eclipse tracked across parts of the Northern Hemisphere yesterday, 12 August 2026. If you haven’t already seen the CIMSS Blog post on yesterday’s total solar eclipse from the GOES perspective, be sure to check it out.<\/a> However, this was a high-latitude eclipse and it was difficult to see the lunar shadow from the standard geostationary view. By contrast, the polar-orbiting satellites of the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) are able to view the eclipse from a much more direct angle. Here’s a static true color view from NOAA21’s VIIRS at 1720 UTC. Note the expected coloration over the eastern contiguous United States, but as you look further to the north you see the darkening of the ground due to increasingly obscured sunlight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"VIIRS<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Even better, the JPSS satellites also feature the VIIRS imager. What better way to view the simultaneous day and night of a solar eclipse than the Day\/Night Band? Let’s take a look! These images have been plotted via the excellent polar SLIDER<\/a> resource from our colleagues and friends at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere. These images are North Pole views, with Alaska at the bottom center and Greenland off to the upper right. You can see much of the contiguous United States in the lower right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first hint of a partial eclipse began at 1534 UTC (7:34 AM Alaska time, for context). Therefore, this first image, at 1518 shows the pre-eclipse environment. SLIDER overlays previous swaths on the image, hence the nighttime lights in the United States. However, in general nothing too unusual appears to be going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"VIIRS<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The next swath is at 1603 UTC. The eclipse is only a few minutes old at this point, and there’s not really much that is easily identifiable as being an effect of the dimming sun. Still, we see lots of clouds over the North Pole and some clear seas between Greenland and Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"VIIRS<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By the time we reach 1659 UTC, however, we see a substantial change in the darkness over eastern Siberia. The Day\/Night band relies on moonlight when the sun is not available, and when the moon is not present the views are going to be dark. Geometrically, a solar eclipse can only take place during a new moon. Therefore the nighttime parts of the globe are going to be black, and the part of the Earth beneath the moon’s shadow will also be dark. This swath was right at the time the total eclipse first began. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"VIIRS<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With the next swath at 1744 UTC, we see that the shadow has moved to far northern Greenland. The eclipse reached it maximum at 1746 UTC, so this view represents the eclipse at effectively its greatest extent. We can see this as a dark hole in upper center-right of the next image, where previously Greenland clearly had snow, clouds, and ice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"VIIRS<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The JPSS satellites are sun-synchronous, moving from east to west so that they feature largely similar solar characteristics from one swath to the next. Because of this, there are no further satellite views of the eclipse as it moved onward to Spain. Regardless, JPSS gave us a unique perspective of one of nature’s most thrilling (and predictable!) natural phenomena. Stay tuned to the CIMSS Satellite Blog on 2 August 2027, when we’ll be discussing the next solar eclipse which will be taking place over Spain, Africa, and the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eyes around the world were turned toward Greenland, Iceland, and Spain as a total solar eclipse tracked across parts of the Northern Hemisphere yesterday, 12 August 2026. If you haven’t already seen the CIMSS Blog post on yesterday’s total solar eclipse from the GOES perspective, be sure to check it out. However, this was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":71799,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,78,131,98,99],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-interpretation","category-noaa-20","category-noaa-21","category-solar-eclipse","category-solar-eclipse-shadow"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71789"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71800,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71789\/revisions\/71800"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}