Like almost everyone, I carry a cell phone everywhere, and I also used it to try to capture the eclipse.
I had a cell phone eclipse filter that came with the eclipse glasses, but I couldn’t really get it to work.
My favorite kind of cell phone photography is the pano shot, rotating myself around to get an extremely wide angle view. I think the iPhone excels at that. I took a pano shot showing the row of photographers to either side of me just before totality.
I took a pano shot during totality that also shows Venus above and to the left of the eclipsed sun.
I also took some pictures of the setting sun. The pictures I got from the Panasonic LUMIX camera were better, but these were not bad.
What an amazing experience! Pictures from four different cameras, all of them interesting in their own way, but none better than being there in person.
I had deliberately limited myself to a single, wide-angle 12 – 60 mm lens for my travel camera, a Panasonic LUMIX DC-GX9. I didn’t want to waste time swapping lenses during totality, and my goal, like with the GoPro, was to capture the wider field, trusting the SeeStar to capture the eclipsed sun itself.
Nevertheless, the first temptation was to image the eclipsed sun. And, unlike the SeeStar, the image wasn’t saturated, so the hot pink solar prominence on the left side of the sun showed as hot pink, although with a 60 mm lens, there wasn’t a lot of detail.
Then I followed my plan and took pictures of the eclipsed sun with the landscape. I took some with the 12-60 mm lens set at 24 mm, capturing Venus as well as the eclipsed sun in one of them. Venus was about 50% illuminated, so it was a half-moon shape, although again with this lens there was not a lot of detail.
I also took some pictures with the 12 – 60 mm lens set at 60 mm. Venus was out of the frame for this one.
As the Moon moved away from blocking the sun, I stopped taking pictures … until sunset, when the sun was clearly a crescent and then a fin as it set behind the mountains.
What an amazing sight.
Which view do you like the best?
Camera geek info:
Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GF7 set at f/5.6, 15 second exposure, ISO 1600
LUMIX G VARIO F3.5-5.6/12 – 60
Corona image: 60 mm, ISO 200, f6.3, 1/40 sec exposure
Widefield image: 24 mm, ISO 3200, f8, 1/40 sec exposure
Widefield image with Venus: 24 mm, ISO 200, f6.3, 1/40 sec exposure
Normal image: 60 mm, ISO 3200, f8, 1/13 sec exposure
Sunset images: 60 mm, ISO 200, f14, 1/50 sec exposure
One of the things I wanted to capture with the total solar eclipse was the wide field experience of the sky getting darker and darker and then the weird alien sky with a black circle surrounded by a white glow (potentially with hot pink prominences) and the sunset colors on either side. And, for this particular eclipse, also the crescent sunset.
I have a GoPro camera, so I decided to bring it and attach it to the tripod I had my SeeStar on and capture just the period around totality and the sunset. I set it in auto mode for shutter, white balance, and ISO because I anticipated a pretty large dynamic range for how much light there was.
Unfortunately, some idiot (pointing fingers at my own head here) stood in front of the GoPro in order to remove and install the solar filter on the SeeStar. So I didn’t get a video of the whole event because my own hands, back, cell phone, and camera were in the way. Lessons learned: set up the cameras so managing one won’t block another.
However, I was able to extract video of entering totality and exiting totality. I also got video of the sunset, but the view was too wide and the sun too bright to really see the crescent shape. The pictures I got with my Panasonic LUMIX camera were better, which I’ll share in a future blog post.
I was also able to extract images from the video of the diamond ring on both sides of totality as well as totality itself.
Even though it isn’t 100% what I was after, it’s still pretty amazing. (And I used other cameras as well, which will get their own blog posts.)
When I retired, my amazing co-workers gave me a SeeStar S30 smart telescope as a retirement gift. I was already planning on going to Spain to see the 2026 total solar eclipse, and I had been agonizing over what gear to take, trying to balance between what would produce the best result vs how much gear I was willing to transport on an airplane. I decided the SeeStar was the perfect solution – I could transport it in my backpack, with a tripod in my suitcase.
Based on previous eclipse experiences, I wanted to be flexible on the day in case we had to avoid clouds or wildfires. So we had our base station in Madrid and planned on driving in the best direction on the day. When it looked like we would have clear conditions over the whole region north of Madrid, I found the Autopia group was having an event at the Aerodromo de Siguenza with paella, drinks, bathrooms, music, and a bunch of really cool cars, and I signed up.
We got to the site several hours early to avoid the predicted eclipse traffic and sat under the trees in the shade (it was hot!) and ate and checked out the cool cars and watched a green airplane flying over the runway. My husband, son, and I walked up to the end of the runway for the view over to Siguenza in the valley. There was a good horizon towards the direction the eclipse would be, and the sky was clear! I was very excited that it looked like perfect eclipse weather!
Around 7 PM, I walked up to the end of the runway with my gear and started setting up. I set up the SeeStar first. My husband had 3D printed me an extra piece to cover the wide-angle camera so it wouldn’t be pointed at the sun the whole time. I put that on with the wide-angle cover not covering the camera, put the solar filter on, and found the sun. Then I rotated the cover so it protected the wide-angle camera. It was a little windy, so I shortened the tripod to make it more stable, found the sun again, and started recording just before first contact at 7:35:38 PM, using time lapse mode and a picture every 2 seconds. (I had other cameras I used as well; they’ll get their own blog posts.). I could see several sun spots.
My group – my husband, my son and daughter-in-law, my daughter-in-law’s mother and brother, and her brother’s two friends – came to join me. We named the different modes of the eclipse – cookie bite mode, banana mode, fingernail mode. As totality approached, it got darker and darker. I was conservative on when I took the solar filter off the SeeStar after totality at 8:30:14 PM.
Totality was amazing. A truly alien sky for a minute and 38 seconds. Naked eye you could see the pink prominence to the left of the sun. I have more pictures from other cameras, but I also tried to spend some time just experiencing the weird sky.
When the moon moved away from blocking the sun, I put the solar filter back on the SeeStar. Coming out of totality does not feel as amazing as going in, but this eclipse occurred just before sunset, so as the sun set, it was still a crescent. The sun set behind a mountain with cell towers on it, and it ended up in fin mode as only the top part of the crescent was visible.
We stayed at the site for a while, back under the trees, listening to the music, hoping to experience less traffic driving back to Madrid. We didn’t miss all the traffic, and we got back to the Madrid parking garage around 1 AM.
