A leap of a few seconds, calculated to coincide with the only useful minute. The Spanish skateboarder Danny León performed an aerial with grab on a ramp set up in an open field just at the moment in which the Moon completely covered the solar disk, transforming the eclipse into the backdrop of his silhouette in flight.
In the caption of the post published on his Instagram profile, the athlete defined it as “the trick of my life: eclipse mode”, adding that after the Sun and the Moon “today we make history with this eclipse” and thanking the team that made the shot possible. It is not the first time that León has constructed an image around a celestial body: in April 2025 he had himself filmed in mid-air with the orange disk of the setting Sun behind him.
Thirty-one years old, who grew up in the Móstoles skatepark just outside Madrid, León participated in the Tokyo 2020 Games, where he finished ninth in the park, and in the Paris 2024 Games.
The feat arrived during the total eclipse of August 12, visible in the band of totality that crossed Greenland, Iceland, northern Spain and the Balearics, with La Coruña, Bilbao, Zaragoza, Valencia and Palma within the cone of shadow. In Italy the phenomenon was only partial, with increasing coverage from the South-East to the North-West: from 18 percent in Calabria to 95 percent in Liguria.
The video surpassed tens of millions of views in just a few hours. The quality of the shot has pushed many users to hypothesize a photomontage or an image generated with artificial intelligence: the doubts were disproved by the direct publication on the skater’s official account, with the credits of the photographer and the crew.