After months of work, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) successfully culminated its scientific, outreach, and educational program in Palencia, where thousands of people enjoyed the total solar eclipse this August 12, 2026.
The programming designed jointly by the IAC and the Palencia City Council has filled the streets and theaters of the province. This historic day concluded with great participation. Thousands of people, including residents and visitors who came from numerous points on the planet, filled the observation points set up in Palencia to enjoy a unique astronomical spectacle live.
The event not only marked a milestone in mass outreach in the capital of Palencia and in towns such as Frómista, Carrión de los Condes, Osorno la Mayor, and Villalcázar de Sirga, but it also hosted a scientific experiment NATE (North Africa Telescope Eclipse) for measuring the solar corona led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University and the United States National Solar Observatory (NSO).
Objectives met for the study of the Sun's behavior
During the minutes of totality, the scientific and technical team from the IAC stationed in Palencia managed to meet the objectives set for the expedition. Researchers operationally tested the equipment for the NATE project, managing to capture high-resolution images of the solar corona, essential for studying the Sun's behavior.
Likewise, the historic 1905 telescope, recently restored for the occasion, worked perfectly, adequately recording the solar corona at the moment of the eclipse's totality.
Once the Moon's shadow passed, the NATE project team began the work of comparing the previous computational prediction of the solar corona with the actual images obtained on the ground, with a similarity result of over 70 percent, which will continue to be analyzed.
An exceptional event
The Minister of Universities, Science and Innovation and Culture of the Government of the Canary Islands, Migdalia Machín, who traveled to Palencia, assured that "we have experienced an exceptional event that has allowed us to verify, once again, the capacity of science to awaken the interest of citizens and bring us closer to knowledge", and thanked "the extraordinary work" of the scientists of the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics, which now opens an exciting stage with the NATE project and with an eye on the total eclipse of 2027 in Morocco.
"The Canary Islands have a scientific community of enormous caliber and we have the responsibility to support their work and ensure that the knowledge generated from the islands continues to reach further and further," added Machín.
The extensive outreach program —which included talks by the director of the IAC, Valentín Martínez Pillet, the deputy director Eva Villaver, NSO physicists such as Kevin Reardon, and researchers such as Lindsay House, Jose Carlos del Toro Iniesta, Irene Puerto, Pablo Redondo, Juan Carlos Pérez Arencibia, Alejandra Goded, Jorge Pérez Gallego, and Gaia Lacedelli— thus concludes its sessions and prepares for the next phase of the project on the occasion of the total solar eclipse of August 2, 2027, in Morocco.
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