It’ll be gone in a flash — complete darkness for Monday’s solar eclipse will last as much as 4 minutes and 28 seconds depending on where you’re in the trail of totality when the moon blocks the face of the sun.
An image lasts for much longer — and a few photographers have long been prepping for the large moment.
Astrophotographer Stan Honda told CNN last week that he’s aiming for Fredericksburg, Texas, with the hopes of clear skies. Though he’s planning to hold 4 cameras, you don’t need that many to capture the ultra-rare event.
“With just about any form of camera or any lens, you may get a superb picture of the eclipse,” Honda explained. “I might just recommend a reasonably sturdy tripod, to make your setup pretty regular, and a distant shutter release, because that means that you can take the photographs without jarring or moving the camera an excessive amount of.”
Listed here are another tricks to help get that once-in-a-lifetime shot.
Get a solar filter
To totally experience the entire eclipse, you’ll should be positioned along the greater than 100-mile-wide path of totality, from Texas to Maine.
You’ll also need a pair of solar glasses to shield your eyes and a solar filter to guard your smartphone’s camera from sunlight damaging the lens and overexposing your shot.
Ready-made smartphone solar filters include the VisiSolar Smartphone Photo Filter and the Solar Snap Eclipse App Kit, Live Science reports.
You may as well make your personal solar filter by holding or taping the lens from a spare pair of solar glasses over the lens of your smartphone camera, in accordance with Dr. Ralph Chou, a professor emeritus of optometry and vision science on the University of Waterloo.
Every little thing to know in regards to the 2024 solar eclipse
- The solar eclipse will happen Monday, April 8, blocking the sun for over 180 million people in its path.
- The eclipse will expand from Mexico’s Pacific Coast across North America, hitting 15 US states and pulling itself all of the strategy to the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
- Latest Yorkers will experience the solar eclipse just after 2 p.m. Monday.
- An enormous explosion on the sun, often known as a coronal mass ejection, is anticipated, in accordance with experts. This happens when massive particles from the sun are hurled out into space, explains Ryan French of the National Solar Observatory in Boulder, Colorado.
- To avoid serious injury to the eyes, it’s essential to view the event through proper eyewear like eclipse glasses, or a handheld solar viewer, through the partial eclipse phase before and after totality.
- The following total solar eclipse will happen on Aug. 12, 2026, and totality can be visible to those in Greenland, Iceland, Spain, Russia and a small slice of Portugal.
Set the main focus and exposure
When you’ve secured your solar filter, you’ll wish to be certain you manually set the main focus and exposure.
“The automated settings just won’t work with the filter on, because many of the frame can be black, so it’ll be like taking an image at night,” Honda told CNN. “Manually focusing can be an enormous help, too — you may autofocus on the sun, but then you could have to disable the autofocus in order that your camera doesn’t try to maintain focusing through the filter. It’s so dark that it’ll be fooled by the darkness, and it won’t find a way to focus.”
To manually set the give attention to your phone, tap the moon in your screen.
On an iPhone, a small sun icon should appear to the correct of the main focus box. Drag the icon up or all the way down to adjust the exposure.
Android users might want to hold their finger on the moon on their screen for several seconds before moving their finger left or right to regulate the main focus.
Photographers can even wish to turn the flash off for a transparent photo.
Watch out with the zoom
As you zoom in, you frequently lose the standard of the photo depending on the device, so watch out with how close you get.
The iPhone 15 Pro boasts a telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom — which the Washington Post reports will yield one of the best quality — and as much as 15x digital zoom.
Samsung Galaxy S Ultra phones have 3x to 10x optical zoom. The Space Zoom feature allows zooms as much as 100x.
But if you happen to don’t have these fancy phones, you should buy a $20-$50 telephoto lens attachment for 12x to 18x the view.
Use burst mode to capture the ‘diamond ring’
It is best to also practice with the iPhone’s burst mode feature — which takes multiple photos directly — before the large show.
The solar eclipse is anticipated to last about two-and-a-half hours, but probably the most stunning a part of the event is often known as the “diamond ring,” which occurs right before the eclipse reaches totality and just after.
“It’s this very shiny section of the sun, just on one corner of it — it looks like a hoop with a diamond on it, and that lasts for just just a few seconds, perhaps 10 or so,” Honda said.
Use the burst mode to your best shot at capturing the diamond ring.
It’ll be gone in a flash — complete darkness for Monday’s solar eclipse will last as much as 4 minutes and 28 seconds depending on where you’re in the trail of totality when the moon blocks the face of the sun.
An image lasts for much longer — and a few photographers have long been prepping for the large moment.
Astrophotographer Stan Honda told CNN last week that he’s aiming for Fredericksburg, Texas, with the hopes of clear skies. Though he’s planning to hold 4 cameras, you don’t need that many to capture the ultra-rare event.
“With just about any form of camera or any lens, you may get a superb picture of the eclipse,” Honda explained. “I might just recommend a reasonably sturdy tripod, to make your setup pretty regular, and a distant shutter release, because that means that you can take the photographs without jarring or moving the camera an excessive amount of.”
Listed here are another tricks to help get that once-in-a-lifetime shot.
Get a solar filter
To totally experience the entire eclipse, you’ll should be positioned along the greater than 100-mile-wide path of totality, from Texas to Maine.
You’ll also need a pair of solar glasses to shield your eyes and a solar filter to guard your smartphone’s camera from sunlight damaging the lens and overexposing your shot.
Ready-made smartphone solar filters include the VisiSolar Smartphone Photo Filter and the Solar Snap Eclipse App Kit, Live Science reports.
You may as well make your personal solar filter by holding or taping the lens from a spare pair of solar glasses over the lens of your smartphone camera, in accordance with Dr. Ralph Chou, a professor emeritus of optometry and vision science on the University of Waterloo.
Every little thing to know in regards to the 2024 solar eclipse
- The solar eclipse will happen Monday, April 8, blocking the sun for over 180 million people in its path.
- The eclipse will expand from Mexico’s Pacific Coast across North America, hitting 15 US states and pulling itself all of the strategy to the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
- Latest Yorkers will experience the solar eclipse just after 2 p.m. Monday.
- An enormous explosion on the sun, often known as a coronal mass ejection, is anticipated, in accordance with experts. This happens when massive particles from the sun are hurled out into space, explains Ryan French of the National Solar Observatory in Boulder, Colorado.
- To avoid serious injury to the eyes, it’s essential to view the event through proper eyewear like eclipse glasses, or a handheld solar viewer, through the partial eclipse phase before and after totality.
- The following total solar eclipse will happen on Aug. 12, 2026, and totality can be visible to those in Greenland, Iceland, Spain, Russia and a small slice of Portugal.
Set the main focus and exposure
When you’ve secured your solar filter, you’ll wish to be certain you manually set the main focus and exposure.
“The automated settings just won’t work with the filter on, because many of the frame can be black, so it’ll be like taking an image at night,” Honda told CNN. “Manually focusing can be an enormous help, too — you may autofocus on the sun, but then you could have to disable the autofocus in order that your camera doesn’t try to maintain focusing through the filter. It’s so dark that it’ll be fooled by the darkness, and it won’t find a way to focus.”
To manually set the give attention to your phone, tap the moon in your screen.
On an iPhone, a small sun icon should appear to the correct of the main focus box. Drag the icon up or all the way down to adjust the exposure.
Android users might want to hold their finger on the moon on their screen for several seconds before moving their finger left or right to regulate the main focus.
Photographers can even wish to turn the flash off for a transparent photo.
Watch out with the zoom
As you zoom in, you frequently lose the standard of the photo depending on the device, so watch out with how close you get.
The iPhone 15 Pro boasts a telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom — which the Washington Post reports will yield one of the best quality — and as much as 15x digital zoom.
Samsung Galaxy S Ultra phones have 3x to 10x optical zoom. The Space Zoom feature allows zooms as much as 100x.
But if you happen to don’t have these fancy phones, you should buy a $20-$50 telephoto lens attachment for 12x to 18x the view.
Use burst mode to capture the ‘diamond ring’
It is best to also practice with the iPhone’s burst mode feature — which takes multiple photos directly — before the large show.
The solar eclipse is anticipated to last about two-and-a-half hours, but probably the most stunning a part of the event is often known as the “diamond ring,” which occurs right before the eclipse reaches totality and just after.
“It’s this very shiny section of the sun, just on one corner of it — it looks like a hoop with a diamond on it, and that lasts for just just a few seconds, perhaps 10 or so,” Honda said.
Use the burst mode to your best shot at capturing the diamond ring.
