The solar eclipse next year will be visible from Spain around 8:30 pm local time—very close to sunset. That means the Sun will be low, between about 4° and 12° above the horizon, looking toward the west to north‑west. On our map Eclipse Map 2026 – Besselian Elements you can see, for each location, the expected time and the corresponding viewing direction.
To understand what the sky typically looks like in that exact direction, we looked at the many weather webcams available on Windy.com. There are around twenty cameras pointing (more or less) toward the eclipse azimuth.
Data collection
During summer 2025, every day around the eclipse time we saved snapshots from these webcams. In some feeds the Sun is directly in view; in others the framing is close but not perfect, so the Sun falls slightly outside the field of view.
Each image was then analysed to estimate cloud cover—used here as a proxy for the probability of seeing the eclipse under those sky conditions. The goal is not a binary “Sun visible / not visible” decision (especially when the Sun is not perfectly framed), but a consistent measure of how cloudy the sky was in the relevant direction.
For these locations we also computed the average cloud cover over a window from 15 days before to 15 days after the eclipse date—using the same approach as in our other article, where satellite data were used to estimate mean cloudiness over Spain along the eclipse line of sight
Result
On the main map you’ll find a dedicated layer with the webcam locations and, for each camera, a collage of all the snapshots collected last year, plus a time series showing how the estimated cloud cover evolves day by day. The mean cloud-cover value is included as well. We also provide a link to each webcam’s live feed—an interesting option for anyone who might not be able to travel next year but still wants to follow the eclipse remotely.
Note
A useful note on interpretation: when we say that a site has an average cloud cover of, for example, 30%, that number is the mean of a distribution—it comes with variability (and therefore a standard deviation). You can see this clearly in the charts: cloud cover can swing from 0% to 100% when cloud fronts pass through. So it’s not correct to imagine “30% of the sky is cloudy every day”, nor “30% of days are perfectly overcast and the rest perfectly clear”. Reality is typically somewhere in between, and the day-to-day behaviour is visible in the time series.
The values shown here can be directly compared with the estimates presented in our satellite-based analysis. The comparison is straightforward on the official map: simply toggle the different available layers to move between webcam-derived and satellite-derived cloudiness indicators. Also the shadows calculation can be verified against the images of the webcam.