Astro Photography 

Photographing a Solar Eclipse

updated: 2026-07-30

Important: Never look directly at the sun with your unprotected eyes or camera equipment, even if the sun is 99% hidden behind the moon, as this will damage your eyes or camera sensors. Smartphone cameras can also be damaged by repeatedly taking photos of direct sunlight; this is especially true for the time-lapse feature. 
Only during the limited time period of totality, when only the outer corona of the sun is visible, it is possible to observe the corona with the naked eye or unprotected camera equipment.

Camera settings (during partial eclipse) with mounted solar filter:

  • Solar Filters: Do not use plain aluminum foil or similar makeshift solutions; these are neither safe nor do they improve image quality. Instead, use either professional foil (e.g., from Baader) or specially mounted solar filters; see here. 
  • Focal length: The focal length depends on what you plan to photograph during the solar eclipse (the entire landscape with the sun above the horizon during morning or evening eclipses, or details of the sun's surface). If you want to capture details of the sun's surface, you'll need a focal length of over 600 mm (depending on the sensor size).
  • Format: RAW
  • Exposure: 1/3200s
  • ISO: 100 or less
  • F-Stop: > 9
  • Focus: Manually set the focus to infinity, or better yet: find an object as far away as possible (e.g., the top of a church tower) and focus on it. If the camera has a Live mode, it can also be used later to focus on the edge of the sun
  • Number of exposures: Especially on hot days, strong atmospheric disturbances cause blurry images. Astronomers call this “bad seeing.” That's why it's important to take as many images as possible (100–200)
  • Tracking: When taking pictures with a telephoto lens or telescope, automatic tracking (see mounts) is absolutely necessary.

Time-lapse footage of the solar eclipse

  • use the same settings as above
  • Interval Settings: Solar eclipses can last for a long period of time (e.g., 2 hours) from the start of the eclipse to its end. Therefore, you should carefully consider in advance how long the video clip, compressed from the time-lapse images during post-processing, should be. As a general rule, 30 images result in 1 second of footage. So, if you want to condense the 2 hours of a solar eclipse into 1 minute, that works out to 1 frame every 4 seconds, or 15 frames per minute times 120 minutes = 1,800 frames (or 900 frames for a 30s clip).
  • If you're using an ASIAIR guider plus ZWO camera, use Autorun mode. In the Shooting Schedule, set the First Delay to at least 1 second; set the interval as described above. Reason: There appears to be a bug in the software that causes it to take all shots immediately without any pauses if the First Delay is set to 0.
  • Required Storage Capacity: If individual frames are captured in RAW format, a great deal of storage space is required. Roughly speaking: a recording duration of 1 hour, with a playback duration of 1 second for the video clip, requires 1,800 individual frames. At, say, 45 MB per frame, that requires 81 GB of storage space!!!
    Formula: Record Duration [s] * Clip Speed [frames/s] => Number of exposures * storage requirement / frame => total required storage capacity.




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