Exploring the Universe from Catalunya

The eclipse is only the beginning

On 12 August 2026, the Sun will vanish behind the Moon. Day will turn to night for a few extraordinary minutes. The brightest stars will reappear at midday. And millions of people will look up to witness one of the most extraordinary spectacles nature can offer: a total solar eclipse. But this article is not only about that day. It is about what can come afterwards. About how a single glance at the sky can become the start of a new way of understanding the Universe around us.

We will all remember where we were

For many it will be a once-in-a-lifetime moment. But I would like to offer you a different idea. What if that day were not the end of an experience, but the beginning of a new way of looking at the sky? What if that eclipse, rather than an isolated event we recall with nostalgia, became the starting point of a deeper relationship with the Universe that surrounds us every night?

Total solar eclipses are phenomena of extraordinary rarity. At any given spot on Earth, they occur roughly once every 375 years. That means that for most people living in Catalunya, the 2026 eclipse will be the first and probably the only one they experience in their lifetime. The path of totality will cross the Iberian Peninsula from west to east, entering through Galicia and sweeping across the north and northeast of Spain before exiting over the Balearic Islands. In Catalunya, the band of totality covers the south of the province of Tarragona, the Ebro area and parts of southern Lleida — the 221 Catalan municipalities within totality —, while Barcelona and Girona will see a partial eclipse of very high magnitude: 99.7% obscuration in Barcelona and 98.8% in Girona, according to IEEC calculations. For those able to travel toward the zone of totality, the experience will be absolutely transformative.

What makes a total eclipse special is not only the sudden darkness. It is the sequence of phenomena that accompany it: the abrupt drop in temperature, the restless behaviour of animals, the appearance of the first stars in broad daylight, and that unique instant when the solar corona unfurls around the lunar disc like a halo of white, silvery light. Witnesses of past eclipses often describe it as an experience that transcends the visual, something felt in the body as much as seen with the eyes.

But the sky needs no eclipses to offer us wonders. Every night, above our heads, a silent spectacle unfolds that has been happening since long before we existed and will continue long after we are gone. The difference lies in whether we stop to observe it. This article is an invitation to do just that. To discover that the Universe is closer than we imagine, and that today's technology lets us explore it from places as everyday as a balcony in Catalunya.

«We will all remember where we were on 12 August 2026. But I hope we also remember that this day encouraged us to look up more often.»

When I decided to look up

Space had always fascinated me. Like many people, I knew a few constellations, I would stop to watch an especially bright full Moon, or I was surprised when a planet appeared visible to the naked eye. But the Universe still felt distant. Something reserved for large telescopes and observatories in remote locations, for scientists in white coats and for people with knowledge I did not have.

Everything changed the day I discovered astrophotography. What began as simple curiosity ended up becoming a genuine passion. I chose a smart telescope because I wanted a tool that would let me spend more time observing the sky than learning complex technical setups. I wanted to find out how far today's technology could go in bringing astronomy closer to people like me — without specialised training but eager to explore.

I never imagined the answer. I remember perfectly the first time a nebula appeared on my iPad screen after a session ended. Until that moment it was just a name in an astronomical catalogue: a coordinate, a faceless alphanumeric designation. Suddenly it was in front of me, with its colours, its shapes, its structures of gas and dust that no human eye had ever perceived that way before. The light I was observing had begun its journey thousands of years before reaching my telescope's sensor. In that instant I understood that astrophotography was not only about taking photographs. It was about travelling through time.

Since then, every session is a blend of patience, technology and emotion. You never know exactly what you will discover when you process the images a few hours later. And perhaps that uncertainty is one of the most beautiful things about this hobby.

An observatory on a balcony

One of the questions I am asked most when I show these photographs is very simple: «Where is your observatory?». The answer tends to surprise. Many of these images were taken from a simple balcony. No dome, no high-end equatorial mount, none of the kilometres of distance that separate large professional observatories from cities. Just a smart telescope, a tripod and the night sky that, like it or not, is still up there every night waiting for someone to look at it.

We are living an extraordinary moment for amateur astronomy. Smart telescopes, like the Vaonis Vespera Pro I use, automatically track the movement of the sky, capture hundreds of consecutive photographs and combine them through a process called stacking to reveal details completely invisible to our eyes. The integrated software handles alignment, tracking and basic processing, hugely lowering the barrier to entry for anyone who wants to take up this hobby without first mastering celestial mechanics or advanced optics.

This means it is now possible to take up astrophotography without owning an observatory or having advanced knowledge. Of course, the darker the sky, the better the results. Light pollution is the urban astrophotographer's main enemy: it scatters city light through the atmosphere and reduces contrast between celestial objects and the sky background. But even from an urban setting it is possible to uncover a Universe that stays hidden from most of us. The Moon, the planets, the brightest star clusters and some nebulae are accessible from practically anywhere.

That is why some of my more ambitious sessions take place from spots like La Mata (Coll d'Estenalles), in the Sant Llorenç del Munt i l'Obac Natural Park, just over an hour from Barcelona. There, far from the city lights, the sky regains a depth impossible to reach in urban settings. The faintest nebulae reveal themselves in greater detail, and the Milky Way appears as a milky band crossing the firmament from side to side. But even from home, on especially clear nights, it is possible to capture images that just two decades ago would have required professional equipment and travel to remote latitudes.

And that, probably, is what excites me most. Showing that the Universe is far closer than we imagine. We only need to stop for a few minutes to look up again.

The star of the big day

If the total eclipse will be the great protagonist of the summer of 2026, it is because the Sun is also the protagonist of our planetary system. We see it every day. It gives us light. It gives us warmth. It has set the rhythm of our lives since humankind existed. And yet, we rarely think of it as what it really is: a star. One among the roughly 200 billion that populate our galaxy. But for us, the most important star in the Universe.

The Sun is an immense sphere of plasma almost one and a half million kilometres in diameter, where every second millions of tonnes of hydrogen turn into helium, releasing an amount of energy hard to imagine. In the solar core, the temperature exceeds 15 million degrees Celsius and the pressure is so extreme that hydrogen atoms fuse in a process called nuclear fusion. That energy takes thousands of years to travel from the core to the surface, where it is finally released as light and heat that reaches Earth in just eight minutes.

With the right filters we can observe sunspots, regions where intense magnetic fields alter the surface of our star. They change constantly. They appear. They vanish. They remind us that the Sun is alive, that it is not a static ball of fire but a dynamic object in constant evolution. The solar cycle, of roughly eleven years, determines the number of sunspots we observe and the intensity of solar magnetic activity, which in turn influences phenomena such as the auroras.

During a total eclipse we will also have the chance to contemplate one of the most spectacular phenomena in all of astronomy: the solar corona. An extremely tenuous atmosphere normally hidden by the intense glare of the solar disc. The corona reaches temperatures of several million degrees, much hotter than the visible surface of the Sun, a mystery solar physicists have not yet fully resolved. It will be a spectacle of just a few minutes. That is precisely why it is so extraordinary.

The Moon, our celestial laboratory

Before photographing nebulae thousands of light-years away, every enthusiast ends up pointing at the Moon. And it is no coincidence. It is the most rewarding object in the sky. It is close, it is bright, and each phase completely transforms its appearance, offering us a different spectacle every night. For anyone starting out in astrophotography, the Moon is the first great teacher: it teaches patience, precise focus and the importance of light and shadow in revealing detail.

But there is one moment that is especially fascinating for observers: the terminator. It is the line separating lunar day from night. There the shadows stretch across mountains and craters, creating a spectacular relief that reveals the topography of our celestial companion with a clarity found nowhere else on the lunar surface. Craters appear as perfect rings surrounded by ejected material, mountain ranges cast shadows that can extend for dozens of kilometres, and dark valleys contrast with the brightest areas of the lunar regolith.

Each night the illumination changes slightly. The terminator advances relentlessly as the Moon completes its cycle of phases, revealing new details and hiding others. That is why no two photographs are ever exactly alike. After hundreds of years of observing it, the Moon is still able to surprise us. The astronomers of the 17th century, such as Galileo, pointed their first telescopes at the Moon and discovered that its surface was not smooth and perfect as believed, but rugged, full of craters and mountains. Today, with far more advanced equipment, we still find details that amaze us.

For the astrophotographer, the Moon is also a fundamental technical exercise. Its intense brightness requires very short exposures, tracking must be precise to avoid blur, and processing the images lets you experiment with contrast and sharpness before tackling fainter objects. It is the perfect starting point for anyone who wants to venture into astrophotography, and probably the celestial object that accumulates the most photographs on the memory cards of enthusiasts worldwide.

Beyond the Solar System

When the telescope leaves the Sun and the Moon behind, a much longer journey begins. The light captured in these images set out long before the Internet, mobile phones or even some of the buildings from which we observe the sky today. In some cases we are talking about hundreds of years. In others, thousands. And in the case of the most distant galaxies we can capture with amateur equipment, millions of years.

That completely changes the way we contemplate a photograph. We are no longer merely observing an image. We are contemplating the Universe's past. The light we see today from the Orion Nebula left it roughly 1,344 years ago, in the middle of the Middle Ages. That of the North America Nebula has been travelling for 2,600 years, since before Rome dominated the Mediterranean. Each photograph is, in essence, a time machine.

The deep sky —that term astronomers use to refer to all objects beyond our solar system— is full of wonders waiting to be discovered. Nebulae where new stars are born, remains of stars that died millennia ago in colossal explosions, star clusters with hundreds of grouped suns, and entire galaxies with their own planetary systems spinning in the darkness of intergalactic space.

The most extraordinary thing is that many of these objects are visible with relatively modest equipment. You do not need to be a professional astronomer or own a telescope worth several million euros to contemplate the same nebulae that adorn astronomy textbooks. Technology has democratised access to the deep sky in a way that would have seemed science fiction just two decades ago. And that, at heart, is what makes astrophotography one of the most democratic and fascinating hobbies there is.

The great deep-sky nebulae

Among all deep-sky objects, nebulae hold a special place in the hearts of astrophotographers. They are the cathedrals of the cosmos: immense structures of gas and dust stretching across light-years, lit from within by the stars born inside them or by the remains of stars that died millennia ago. Each has its own personality, its own colours and its own story to tell.

M42 and M43 · The Orion Nebula

The great jewel of the winter sky. Inside it, enormous clouds of gas and dust continue forming new stars. It is a true stellar nursery where we can observe the birth of suns in astronomical real time. Visible to the naked eye as a diffuse smudge in Orion's sword, it reveals its true magnificence through the telescope.

IC 434 · The Horsehead Nebula

Few silhouettes are as recognisable in the world of astronomy. Curiously, it does not shine by itself. What we see is an immense cloud of interstellar dust concealing the bright hydrogen cloud behind it. Its apparent simplicity hides one of the most demanding objects for any astrophotographer, and every photograph achieved carries something of a personal reward.

Thor's Helmet Nebula

The intense reddish and bluish tones of this nebula are the result of the violent evolution of a massive star. The gas keeps slowly expanding through space, reminding us that the Universe never stays still. Even stars are born, evolve and disappear. Everything changes. In the sky too.

NGC 7000 · A conversation with the Universe

If I had to choose one image that summed up why I do astrophotography, it would probably be this one. The North America Nebula gets its name from the striking resemblance of its silhouette to the American continent. But behind that familiar shape hides an immense region of ionised hydrogen where new stars are still being born.

The light we see today began its journey roughly 2,600 years ago. To think it has crossed space for more than two millennia to end up as part of a photograph taken from Catalunya produces a feeling hard to explain. At that moment the photograph stops being merely an image. It becomes a silent conversation with the Universe.

The North America Nebula lies in the constellation Cygnus, very close to the bright star Deneb, one of the corners of the Summer Triangle. To the naked eye, from dark skies, it appears as a faint, barely perceptible smudge. But when telescope and camera combine to gather light over hours, the nebula reveals its full structure: gulfs, peninsulas and coasts of gas that trace, with surprising fidelity, the outline of the continent that gives it its name.

This image in particular represents everything astrophotography can offer: the combination of technology, patience and wonder. Each pixel holds photons that have travelled for 2,600 years across interstellar space, passing through dust clouds, dodging stars and crossing the void between galaxies, to end their journey on the sensor of a small telescope on a balcony in Catalunya. There is no more powerful metaphor for understanding our connection with the cosmos.

The eclipse will be only the beginning

Years from now we will probably all remember where we watched the total eclipse of 12 August 2026. But I hope we also remember something else: that this day encouraged us to look up more often. Because the real spectacle does not end when the Moon leaves the solar disc. Every night, planets, star clusters, nebulae and galaxies keep waiting for us, their light having travelled thousands or even millions of years.

All it takes is to switch off the noise of the day for a moment. To look up. And to let curiosity do the rest. Perhaps then you will discover, as I did, that the Universe was far closer than you imagined. That you do not need a professional observatory or years of study to start exploring the deep sky. That today's technology has put within everyone's reach tools that just two decades ago were unthinkable for the average enthusiast.

The 2026 eclipse will be an extraordinary moment. But astronomy does not live on extraordinary moments: it lives on constancy, on curiosity, on those nights when you step out onto the balcony with no expectations and find Jupiter shining among the clouds, or discover that the Moon is in a phase you had not seen for months, or catch a shooting star that crossed the frame at just the right moment. Amateur astronomy is, at heart, a permanent invitation to wonder: that almost childlike capacity to marvel at something greater than ourselves, and one we should never lose.

If this article has inspired you to look at the sky with new eyes, then it will have served its purpose. The Universe has been waiting for billions of years. It can wait a few more minutes while you switch off the screen and go out to find it. I promise you it is worth it.

About the author · Marcos Osorio

Marcos Osorio is a digital artist and astrophotographer based in Catalunya. He combines creativity, technology and outreach to bring the deep sky closer to a general audience through the Vaonis Vespera Pro smart telescope. Several of his images have been featured by Vaonis on its official channels.

📷 @OSORIOastronomy

The images in this article were captured by the author with a Vaonis Vespera Pro smart telescope. Text and images © Marcos Osorio, published with permission on eclipsi26.com.

Eclipse data verified with the IEEC (Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya) and the IGN (Instituto Geográfico Nacional): 99.7% obscuration in Barcelona and 98.8% in Girona on 12 August 2026.