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.
What a wonderful day.
Camera geek info:
- SeeStar S30 timelapse 2 second intervals
Space&Aliens 