Total Solar Eclipse Explained: Live!

The total solar eclipse that passed over Spain in 2025 lasts about 90 seconds. The MKBHD team traveled from the United States to Zaragoza, Spain, to witness it, setting up a full production in a vineyard valley with a custom-built timer called the Elio Rufus 9000 that tracks ambient temperature, light meter readings, and obscurity percentage in real time. The episode is recorded live as the eclipse unfolds.

Why a total solar eclipse is possible at all

A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes directly between the Earth and the sun, casting a shadow only 50 to 150 miles wide. The key fact that makes this possible on Earth is a coincidence of ratios: the sun is about 400 times farther away from Earth than the moon, but it is also about 400 times larger. This means both bodies appear the same size in the sky. When they align perfectly, the moon can fully cover the sun, creating a "magnitude" of 1.0. On other planets, moons do not match this ratio — Mars's moon Phobos, for example, only blocks part of the sun. This perfect alignment is temporary: the moon is moving away from Earth at roughly one inch per year, meaning there is a finite number of total solar eclipses left. The last one is estimated to occur about half a billion years from now.

What it looks and feels like as totality approaches