Our SAS flight from Zürich to Copenhagen happened to depart almost exactly at the peak of this week’s solar eclipse, giving my kids and me an unusual view of the partially-obscured sun as we taxied out and took off.

Flying Out Of Zürich At The Peak Of A Solar Eclipse

I’m jumping ahead a bit, but was back in Germany this week to pick up the kids and we ended up flying out of Zürich right at the peak of the solar eclipse…I figured I better write about it now rather than in a couple weeks.

I’ve been taking a break from the news this summer, to the extent that I can. I have not completely checked out, but I’m not paying extremely close attention to current events because it just makes me feel despondent…there will be plenty of time for that as we approach the U.S. midterm elections this fall. Anyway, I wasn’t even aware that there was an eclipse, let alone that I was in a part of the world in which it would be visible (Spain was best, but it would be partially visible in Germany, Switzerland, and other parts of Europe as well).

My mother-in-law told me the peak would be at around 3 pm CET and she went to four different places trying to find the special glasses so you can look up at the eclipse…but failed. Everyone was sold out. I finally pulled up a story on it and found that the height of the eclipse would actually not be until around 8:00 pm, precisely when the kids and I were flying from Zurich (ZRH) to Copenhagen (CPH) on SAS.

While there was a total eclipse visible in northern regions of Spain (as well as parts of Iceland, Greenland and Portugal), because Zurich was located outside the path of totality, the city did not experience total darkness or a view of the solar corona.

We boarded our flight around 7:55 pm and pushed back at 8:20 pm. The eclipse peaked over Zürich at 8:18 pm and unfortunately we could not see the sun at this time as we were parked at the gate. But the sky substantially darkened:

As we taxied out, though, we could see the moon was still visibly covering part of the sun (though I had to frequently warn my kids not to look directly at it). As we took off, the sun was still somewhat obscured, though it was very hard to capture any pictures from the window of the plane until we got higher up and by then it was too late.

20 minutes later, the sun was visible again:

Not quite the same as observing a total solar eclipse from the ground, but still something interesting. The kids will be in Europe next summer as well and I’m considering taking them to Egypt to view the solar eclipse next year…it’s actually quite a rare thing!