July 23, 2026

Viewing and Photographing the August 12, 2026 Total Solar Eclipse

The next total solar eclipse is three weeks away. On August 12, 2026, the Moon's shadow sweeps across Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, the North Atlantic, Spain, and a small corner of Portugal.

If you're going, this eclipse is not like 2024. Two things make it different, and both should shape every decision you make:

Totality is short. Most locations in the path get less than two minutes. Even near the centerline it stays under about two and a half minutes.
The Sun will be very low. In Spain, totality happens in the late evening, shortly before sunset — the Sun will be somewhere between about 4° and 11° above the horizon depending on where you stand. In several cities the Sun actually sets while the eclipse is still in its partial phase.

A low Sun changes your site selection, your composition, your exposures, and how you align your mount. We'll cover all of it.

Eclipse map courtesy of NASA / NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio.

If you only do four things

Get certified eclipse glasses for everyone in your group. Shop eclipse glasses →
Scout a site with a completely open west-northwest horizon. In Spain, a ridgeline or a row of trees will end your eclipse before the Moon does.
Rehearse your entire filter-off / filter-on sequence at home, on the real Sun, until you can do it without thinking. You have well under two minutes.
Order your gear now. If you're flying to Europe, you need it in hand with time to test it. Questions? Call us at 1-877-279-5280.

Eye safety comes first

Except during the brief moments of totality, you must never look at the Sun without proper eye protection. That applies to every second of the partial phases, and it applies for the entire eclipse if you are outside the path of totality. At sunset is the exception - when the sun is at the horizon, at times when you would normally be able to view a sunset. This should make for a spectacular eclipse sunset!

Use ISO 12312-2 certified eclipse glasses or a handheld solar viewer. Regular sunglasses are not safe, no matter how dark they are — safe solar viewers are thousands of times darker. We only stock glasses from suppliers vetted against the American Astronomical Society's list of reputable vendors.

Never look at the Sun through a camera lens, telescope, or binoculars while wearing eclipse glasses. The optics concentrate sunlight enough to burn straight through the filter and cause serious, permanent eye injury in an instant. Any telescope, binocular, or camera lens needs its own special-purpose solar filter mounted on the front, not at the eyepiece.

If you don't have eclipse glasses, project instead. A pinhole in an index card, a kitchen colander, or the gaps in a leafy tree will all cast crescent-shaped images of the eclipsed Sun onto the ground. Stand with your back to the Sun and look at the projection. More on indirect viewing methods from the AAS.

Totality and Sunset are the exception. Once the Moon fully covers the Sun's bright face — and only if you are inside the path of totality — you can and should look with your naked eyes. The moment the first sliver of the Sun's surface reappears, the glasses go back on. Set an alarm on your phone for 10 seconds before third contact so you aren't relying on your own judgment in the moment. Since this is a sunset eclipse, when the sun reaches the horizon, you can view it as you would a normal sunset.

Where and when

Below are some details about the eclipse for select cities. All times are local. An asterisk (*) under "Partial Ends" means the Sun sets while still partially eclipsed, and the time given is sunset.

An asterisk (*) under “Partial Ends” indicates that the eclipse will end after sunset and the time given is for sunset.

Total eclipse

City	Partial Begins	Totality Begins	Totality Ends	Partial Ends
León (Spain)	7:32 p.m.	8:28 p.m.	8:30 p.m.	9:22 p.m.
Reykjavík (Iceland)	4:47 p.m.	5:48 p.m.	5:49 p.m.	6:47 p.m.
Valencia (Spain)	7:38 p.m.	8:32 p.m.	8:33 p.m.	9:01 p.m. *
Zaragoza (Spain)	7:34 p.m.	8:29 p.m.	8:30 p.m.	9:07 p.m. *

Contact times courtesy of NASA.

If you're watching the partial eclipse

Most of Europe, northwestern Africa, most of Canada, and parts of the northern United States from Alaska across to North Carolina will see a partial eclipse. Some highlights:

Location	Max coverage
Barcelona, Madrid (Spain)	99%
Lisbon (Portugal)	95%
Algiers (Algeria)	96%
Dublin (Ireland)	94%
Paris (France), Milan (Italy)	92%
London (U.K.)	91%
Casablanca (Morocco)	87%
Berlin (Germany)	85%
Fairbanks, Alaska (USA)	37%
Halifax (Canada)	31%
Boston, Mass. (USA)	16%
New York, N.Y. (USA)	9%

Coverage figures courtesy of NASA.

A word to our Colorado customers: none of this eclipse is visible from Denver or anywhere in Colorado. If you want to see it, you're getting on a plane. If you can't make this one, the next total solar eclipse over the continental United States is a long way off — but there's a total eclipse crossing southern Spain and North Africa in August 2027 with a much longer totality, and that one is worth starting to plan for now.

And to be clear: if you're anywhere in the 99% zone, your solar filter never comes off. Ninety-nine percent is not totality. It's still hundreds of thousands of times too bright to look at, and the corona will not appear. If you are anywhere near the path, drive the extra hour and get inside it.

The low Sun changes everything

This is the part that generic eclipse-photography advice will not tell you, and it matters more than your choice of camera.

Scout your horizon obsessively. With the Sun at 6°, a 30-foot tree 300 feet away blocks it. A hill on the horizon 10 miles away blocks it. Use a compass or a planetarium app to find the exact azimuth of the Sun at totality for your site, then physically stand there and look the day before. Google Earth's terrain profile is useful for checking distant ridgelines. Have a backup site.

Shoot wide, not just long. At 4–10° altitude you are looking through five to ten times as much atmosphere as you would at midday. Long telephoto shots will shimmer, soften, and lose contrast. The compensating gift is that a low Sun makes the landscape shot possible: a black Sun with a visible corona hanging just above a Spanish ridgeline, twilight colors wrapping the whole horizon. That's a photograph you simply cannot take at a midday eclipse. If you only bring one camera, consider making the wide-field shot your primary and the close-up your bonus.

Add exposure for atmospheric extinction. Expect to open up roughly one stop at 10° altitude and closer to two stops at 5°. The corona will also look noticeably redder and dimmer than the 2024 images you've seen. And be aware that at very low altitude your long "outer corona" exposures may just record bright twilight haze rather than corona — bracket, but don't count on the faint outer streamers.

Polar alignment in daylight is a real problem. You cannot see Polaris at 8:00 p.m. This trips up more people than anything else on this list. Your options:

Use a Sky-Watcher SolarQuest, which uses GPS and a sun sensor to find and track the Sun automatically. No polar alignment, no star alignment, no fuss. For this eclipse in particular, that's a significant advantage.
Rough-align a standard tracker using a compass (corrected for magnetic declination) and an inclinometer or phone level set to your latitude. For a couple of hours of solar tracking at modest focal lengths, rough is usually good enough.
Set up the night before at a fixed site, polar align properly on stars, and don't move the tripod.
If you are shooting wide-field, then a tracker isn't necessary - just frame up your shot where totality will occur.

Watch for shadow bands and the horizon light show. With the Sun this low, the 360° "sunset" effect during totality will be dramatic and asymmetric. Point a second camera or a phone at the horizon on a wide lens and let it run. It's often the shot people treasure most.

Don't forget to enjoy the show

Automate everything you can. Your goal is a rig that runs itself so you can spend those ninety seconds looking up, not squinting at a screen. Every eclipse veteran will tell you the same thing: the people who fiddle with cameras during their first totality regret it.

Smart telescopes for the eclipse

Most of the current generation of smart telescopes are excellent eclipse tools — they find the Sun, track it, and shoot on a schedule while you watch. Browse all smart telescopes →

Important travel note: because of their internal lithium batteries, all smart telescopes must go in your carry-on. They cannot be checked. The same goes for spare battery packs and many camera tracker mounts like the SkyGuider Pro and Star Adventurer.

One caveat for this eclipse: a smart telescope needs to acquire the Sun on its own, and at 5° altitude it's doing that through trees, buildings, and haze. Set up early, get level ground, and confirm it has actually found and centered the Sun well before first contact.

Seestar S30 Pro — our pick

Wide field of view, so minor tracking errors won't cost you the shot. The solar filter is included in the box. The S30 is tiny enough to pack into a carry-on, and the time-lapse mode captures every phase automatically — just pop the solar filter off as totality begins and put it back on the instant totality ends. You also have the option of the wide field lens to get that landscape Eclipse shot we just talked about!

Vaonis Vesperas

Longer focal length and larger aperture for a more detailed solar disk, at the cost of a bit more setup effort. Note that the solar filter is a separate purchase. The hard case is carry-on friendly, or add the optional backpack.

Vespera Solar Image

Dwarf 3 and Dwarf Mini

The most packable option of all, and a strong choice if you want a wide-field eclipse sequence - the DWARFs excel at the wide-field lens imaging in addition to the telephoto.

Smartphone eclipse photography

Yes, your phone can do this. Be sure to get a solar filter for your smartphone, plus the Solar Snap app (iOS / Android), which handles the exposure work for you.

Holding a phone steady enough is harder than it sounds, so bring a tripod and a smartphone holder.

When you point your phone at the Sun, keep your eyes behind the phone and use it as a shield. It's very easy to glance up while lining up the shot.

Honestly, though: the phone's real strength here is the wide shot. With the Sun this low, a phone capturing the horizon, the crowd, and the twilight colors during totality will produce something more memorable than a tiny, soft solar disk. Let the phone do the scene and let a real camera do the Sun.

Mirrorless and DSLR eclipse photography

For serious detail, an interchangeable-lens camera on a solid tripod and a camera tracker is the way to go. Pair it with an intervalometer or your camera's built-in interval timer and the whole partial sequence shoots itself.

Sorin used the Sky-Watcher SolarQuest for both the 2023 annular and 2024 total eclipses — that's it on the left in the photo above, carrying a RedCat 51. He is standing next to the SkyGuider Pro carrying a camera with a 70-200 camera lens.

Mounts to consider

Sky-Watcher SolarQuest ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ — Holds up to 11 lbs, or about an 80mm refractor. Automatically finds and tracks the Sun via GPS and a sun sensor, which neatly solves the daylight-alignment problem described above. Top choice if you plan to chase multiple eclipses or do regular solar observing. (The store owner has one and loves it.)
iOptron SkyGuider Pro ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ — Excellent with telephoto lenses, lightweight and portable. A store-owner favorite for years, through multiple eclipses and countless wide-field deep-sky nights.
Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer GTI ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ — Similar capacity to the SkyGuider Pro plus full GoTo, but heavier and bulkier.
iOptron SkyTracker Pro ⭐️⭐️⭐️ — Lightest of the group, best for lenses under 100mm.

Focal length

For a full-frame or APS-C camera, A 400mm lens gives a comfortably framed disk with room for the corona; 600–800mm gives you prominence detail but demands better tracking and suffers more from the low-altitude atmosphere. While We'd recommend those for most eclipses, the wide angle landscape shot is probably going to be the real treasure for this eclipse.

Planning your Shoot

From first contact to last, this eclipse runs roughly 1 hour 50 minutes to 2 hours — noticeably shorter than 2024, and shorter still in the cities where the Sun sets mid-eclipse. Check your specific site. Totality will be a maximum of just 2 minutes if you are in ideal location - and you probably won't be, so plan for totality to go be FAST!

For the partial phases, a frame every 30 seconds yields around 200–240 images across the whole event, which is plenty for a composite or time-lapse. Shoot much more frequently in the final 30 seconds before and after totality to catch Baily's beads and the diamond ring, which come and go in a couple of seconds.

Exposure bracketing is also a very handy function to make use of during totality. Using bracketing, you can capture three of more exposures in a range of stops, with the base exposure set to what you expect will be your ideal, and the bounds of the bracketing set a few stops above and below that to help you capture the greater extent of the corona and solar limb details.

The C1/C2/C3 positions on this Canon are programmable custom modes. Your camera will differ — check the manual.

If your camera has them, use those custom modes. Pre-program one for filtered partial phases and one for totality so that removing the filter and switching settings is a single click rather than a panicked menu dive. This is the single best preparation you can do.

A time-lapse progression from the 2017 eclipse, with an exposure roughly every 5 minutes.

Focus

Autofocus will hunt and fail during totality and probably the partial phases. Switch to manual, magnify live view to maximum on the Sun's limb, focus carefully during the partial phases, then tape the focus ring down. Check it once more about ten minutes before totality, since focus can drift as the lens adjust to the ambient air.

Camera Exposure Settings

This is where most people freeze up, so here are actual starting points.

Partial phases (filter on)

With a solar filter in place, start around ISO 100, f/8, 1/250 s, then bracket ±3 stops and look at the results. Filter densities vary, so test this at home on the real Sun before you travel — same camera, same lens, same filter. Ten minutes in your driveway now saves the whole shoot later. Even through the partial phases, the exposure settings will not change - do some testing now, and write down the settings you like the best after viewing the images on your computer, not just the back of the camera.

Totality (filter off)

There is no single correct exposure during totality, because the corona spans an enormous brightness range if that is what you want to try to capture. Bracket aggressively — this is what auto-bracketing exists for. Start from your settings for the partial eclipse as the central point of your exposure bracketing:

Feature	Shutter speed
Diamond ring / Baily's beads	1/4000 – 1/2000 s
Chromosphere and prominences	1/2000 – 1/1000 s
Inner corona	1/500 – 1/250 s
Middle corona	1/60 – 1/30 s
Outer corona	1/4 – 1 s

Add roughly 1–2 stops to all of these for the low Sun in Spain. Set a 5- or 7-frame auto-bracket at 2-stop intervals, hold the shutter, and let it run. You can blend the results into a single high-dynamic-range image later, which is how essentially every great corona photograph you've ever seen was made.

Day-of timeline

When	Do this
Day before	Charge everything. Format cards. Test the full filter-off/filter-on routine.
3 hours before	Arrive at your site. Confirm the Sun's actual position clears your horizon.
2 hours before	Set up and align the mount. Frame and focus.
1 hour before	Shoot test frames through the filter. Lock in your partial-phase settings.
Before First contact	Start the intervalometer. Hand out eclipse glasses.
30 seconds before totality	Set your alarm for third contact (end of totality). Switch to the totality mode for your camera.
Totality begins	Filter off, let the camera run. Then look up with your own eyes.
Third contact	Glasses and filter back on, immediately.
After	Let the interval timer run through last contact. Go celebrate.

Choosing Your Solar Filter

It is critical during a solar eclipse or any time your camera is pointed at the sun (with the exception of sunrise/sunset) to have an appropriate solar filter to protect the image sensor. Just like our eyes can be damaged by unfiltered sunlight, the sensor in your camera can get burned, particularly if you are using a long telephoto lens. (If you ever played with a magnifying glass on a sunny day as a like pyromaniac, you'll know that a lens pointing at the sun if bad news for anything focused underneath it.)

Don't rely on standard ND or Neutral Density filters! ND filters do not block nearly enough of the light to prevent damage to the camera. You want a solar filter that will block 99.999% of the light. Solar film filters or glass filters are both appropriate. I prefer to have a filter that slips over the front the the lens, not one that threads on. Why not a thread-on solar filter? It will work just fine for the Annular eclipse, but for the Total Eclipse where you want to remove the filter during totality, a thread-on filter is going to be more of a hassle. Another advantage of a friction fit filter is you can get larger body filters that will do double duty to also act as a sun shade for the camera body. This will prevent the camera itself from overheating while sitting out in the sun for 3 hours!

Thread-on Solar filters

If you are using a camera lens, look at the lens you plan to use and find the thread diameter. This is usually printed on the front of the lens. We carry a wide range of sizes of threaded camera solar filters to accommodate your lens!

Camera Setup with Solar Shade

A piece of white foam board from a craft store, with a circle cut to fit snugly around your lens, makes a fine DIY sun shade. It shades the camera body and gives you a dark area to actually see your rear screen. This matters less for an evening eclipse than it did for the midday events of 2023 and 2024, but if you're setting up hours early in the August Spanish heat, it is something to consider.

Travel and packing checklist

Everything in this list has ruined someone's eclipse by being left at home.

Eclipse glasses for your whole group, plus spares
Solar filter that securely fits your lens or telescope
Spare camera batteries and memory cards (lithium batteries in carry-on only)
Intervalometer and its batteries
European Type C/F power adapters - remember that plus adapters are not voltage converters - make sure whatever you plug in works with 220 volt power!
Compass and inclinometer, or a phone app for both (generally part of the OS)
Gaffer tape, headlamp with red mode, lens cloth
Sun hat, water, and sunscreen — you'll be outside for hours before the main event
Printed contact times for your exact site, in case you have no signal

Get ready with us

We're in Lakewood, and we'd rather you leave with the right gear than the most gear. Come by, call us at 1-877-279-5280, or email support@milehighastro.com and we'll help you sort out filters, mounts, and travel logistics.