I woke up on the morning of Aug. 12 and looked out of the window to something I hadn't dared hope for: blue sky.
After days of scrutinizing weather models that seemed determined to test the nerves of everyone aboard the HX Expeditions ship MS Spitsbergen, somehow, against the odds, the clouds had cleared. Even then, I didn't trust it (especially after my 2024 eclipse experience). We had traveled thousands of miles, crossed the Greenland Sea and ventured deep into Scoresby Sund to put ourselves in the path of the moon's shadow. Now there was nothing to do but wait — and hope the sky stayed clear.
The wind howled across the deck, but nobody seemed to mind. If anything, it was helping us, keeping the clouds at bay. The atmosphere aboard felt like Christmas Eve with a ship full of overexcited children. Some guests had chased eclipses across the world; for others, this would be their first. Either way, Aug. 12 was the date we'd been waiting years for.
But by the time we reached Scoresby Sund, something had shifted.
I had traveled all this way to look up. Instead, I found myself looking around. I'd come here for 2 minutes and 14 seconds of darkness. Instead, Greenland had spent the previous days relentlessly demanding my full attention.
This trip was made possible by travel and accommodation provided by HX Expeditions.
After a couple of days at sea during the crossing from Svalbard to East Greenland, our first sight of land appeared almost like a mirage on the horizon. Soon, icebergs were drifting past the ship and the scale of the landscape became increasingly difficult to comprehend. We could sail for hours through Northeast Greenland National Park without seeing a single sign of human civilization beyond our own ship. At times, moving through those immense geological landscapes felt less like traveling across Earth and more like exploring some distant, icy-covered moon.
Yet, the more otherworldly Greenland appeared, the more it made me appreciate our own planet.
At times it felt as though I'd stepped into a geology textbook. Processes and structures I'd previously seen reduced to diagrams were suddenly towering above me. And amongst all the enormity were the tiniest signs of life: lichens and miniature Arctic plants hugging the ground beneath vast mountains and glaciers.
The scale and contrast were overwhelming at times, and no view stayed the same for long.
An iceberg viewed from one side could morph into a completely different form as the ship sailed past it. A break in the clouds could transform a gray mountainside in seconds. In Scoresby Sund, even the ice seemed to echo the landscape around it as jagged peaks, flat-topped slabs and sculpted ridges rose from the water like miniature versions of the colossal mountains behind them.
The Greenland scenery was a gift that kept on giving, and I found myself increasingly reluctant to go inside. I began meticulously scanning for wildlife, because I'd learned how quickly something extraordinary could appear.
On an impromptu evening walk in Longyearbyen before we set sail, beluga whales had suddenly surfaced in the bay. Later, in Greenland, while I was distracted by a spectacular circumzenithal arc and sundogs overhead, one of a handful of people still standing on deck spotted two tiny white shapes in the water. I thought they were birds bobbing along.
Then I lifted my camera and zoomed in.
Polar bears.
It became something of a lesson for the expedition: stay curious, keep your eyes open and remember to look both up and down.
That curiosity seemed to unite everyone aboard. Guests had traveled from around the world for this eclipse opportunity. There were seasoned eclipse chasers looking to experience totality somewhere extraordinary, first-timers who had no idea how they would react and people drawn as much by the adventure and wildlife, as the eclipse itself.
HX Expeditions' onboard science and education programme gave that shared enthusiasm somewhere to go. Our days were filled with nature landings, lectures, citizen-science projects and conversations with experts, helping us do more than simply travel through Greenland. The programme encouraged us to pay closer attention — not merely to see the landscape, but to understand and truly experience it.
Conversations jumped from eclipses to wildlife, travel, geology and perhaps, inevitably for a ship full of skywatchers, clouds. We took part in the GLOBE Observer cloud citizen science project and found ourselves happily studying them — while collectively hoping they would be nowhere near the sun on eclipse day.
The eclipse had brought us together, but the journey had quickly become about much more.
Then, on Aug. 12, our attention returned to the sky.
When the moon took its first tiny bite from the solar disk, excitement rippled across the deck. For the next hour, it steadily consumed more of the sun.
As totality approached, the quality of the light began to change.
It became strangely yellow and dull, yet at the same time the landscape seemed almost unnaturally sharp. It was eerie — familiar enough to still resemble daylight, but wrong enough that your brain knew something extraordinary was happening.
What amazed me most was how long that daylight persisted.
Even when only the tiniest sliver of sun remained, Greenland was still illuminated. I knew scientifically how intensely bright the solar photosphere is, but knowing it and watching that minuscule fraction of sunlight continue to illuminate an entire landscape were two very different things.
Then the final fraction disappeared.
The world around me plunged into twilight.
And there it was.
Totality.
I knew exactly what I was supposed to see. I've written about eclipses for years. I understand the science. I had seen thousands of photographs of the corona, prominences, Baily's beads and diamond rings.
None of it prepared me for the feeling of actually seeing one.
The first thing that struck me was how large the eclipsed sun appeared to the naked eye. Photographs had never prepared me for that sense of scale, nor how much detail I could see with my own eyes.
The moon itself looked impossibly dark — a black void punched into the sky — surrounded by the pearly white corona. Long streamers stretched away from the sun and around the moon's edge I could see bright pink prominences.
I was so surprised to see this vivid pink color with my own eyes. For 2 minutes and 14 seconds, I saw the sun as I had never seen it before.
But even then, I couldn't just look up.
I looked around. Jupiter and Mercury shone clearly off to one side of the eclipsed sun, with Mercury far brighter and easier to spot than I had expected. Venus blazed on the other side.
Then I looked down. Below the eclipsed sun were icebergs. Beside us rose the immense walls of Scoresby Sund. Glaciers carved their path through the landscape.
Above it all hung that black disk and its enormous, delicate corona. My brain simply couldn't take it all in.
There was too much beauty. Too much scale. Too much happening at once.
People use words such as "mind-blowing" and "speechless" so often that they begin to lose their meaning.
But my mind was really blown. And I really was speechless. Perhaps the best way I can describe it is that my mind felt full, but quiet. Full because there was almost too much to comprehend, but quiet because for those fleeting moments, there was room for nothing else.
The intensity of the experience surprised guests who had originally joined the voyage for different reasons.
"My husband and I came to see the wildlife, and we were actually in awe of what we saw in relation to the solar eclipse," Kenya Haupt, from Colorado, told Space.com. "Truly an emotional experience"
The reasons for joining the expedition varied, but beneath the moon’s shadow, the experience became a collective one.
For Shubhada Maitra, from India, it was her first total solar eclipse.
"When I looked around me, I just had a feeling that we were one community, taking part in one of the most spectacular, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime celestial events," Maitra said. "Although we came from different countries, different nationalities, genders, all of that, that solar eclipse just bound us together."
"Without saying anything, we were just so connected in that experience."
Lisa Marie Morse, from Rhode Island, described the eclipse as both "joyous and melancholy."
"In that moment of darkness, I felt a powerful connection with all living things, to an infinite ancient rhythm locking us together for 134 seconds of shared awareness, then releasing us back into our daily slumber," Morse said. "It was magical."
Then, almost as quickly as totality had arrived, it was ending.
The first brilliant beads of sunlight appeared from behind the moon.
They were beautiful, but there was a sadness in seeing them too. The corona, prominences and extraordinary black void that had dominated the sky were about to disappear once more into the overwhelming glare of the sun.
Two minutes and 14 seconds had somehow felt both packed with experience and impossibly brief. I had just enough time to look with my naked eye, search for planets, check it out through binoculars and try to absorb the reactions around me.
Then it was gone.
For seasoned eclipse chaser Roy Tillcock from the Isle of Wight, the clear view had come as a genuine surprise.
"This was one of the most unexpected eclipses I've seen," he said. "I did not have high hopes of seeing it, and there it was. Brilliant."
And, as if to underline just how fortunate we had been, the clouds rolled in shortly after totality. A few minutes later, and this could have been a very different story.
Some skywatchers were emotional. Others were exhilarated. Many, like me, seemed to be struggling to find words big enough for what had happened.
Perhaps that is part of why eclipse chasing becomes so addictive. We can explain the science of totality in extraordinary detail. We can calculate the path of the moon's shadow years in advance, travel thousands of miles to stand beneath it and know exactly when and where darkness will fall.
But knowing what to expect is not the same as experiencing it.
The following morning, Greenland was still there, still demanding my undivided attention. Icebergs drifted past the ship. Mountains towered above the fjord. The sunlight shifted and the landscape transformed once again. I had traveled all this way to look up.
But somewhere along the journey, I had learned to truly look around. Here I was, standing on a planet of glaciers, oceans, wildlife and ancient rock, watching its moon pass perfectly across its star at a moment in Earth's history when their apparent size in our sky happened to match. How lucky are we to experience any of this? Luck, ultimately, is something no eclipse chaser can ignore.
We could calculate where the shadow would fall. We could sail into its path. We could scrutinize forecasts, prepare our equipment and position ourselves as carefully as possible.
But we couldn't command the clouds to cooperate.
Nature always has the final say. And on Aug. 12, 2026, in a remote fjord in East Greenland, nature said yes.
Editor's note: This trip was made possible by travel and accommodation provided by HX Expeditions.
