Just as directly observing a solar eclipse without protective glasses can cause permanent eye damage, photographing an eclipse requires a specialized filter to prevent damaging your camera.

Eclipse glasses protect the eyes from overexposure to the sun's ultraviolet, blue, and infrared light, as a person's instinct to look away from the sun is diminished when it's partly blocked.

The first scientifically useful photograph of a total solar eclipse was taken in Königsberg, Prussia, on July 28, 1851, using a silver-coated copper plate with a light-sensitive chemical layer.

Because the retina lacks pain receptors, during a solar eclipse, those watching without protective eyewear may suffer from permanent damage without realizing it.

A solar eclipse viewer can be made from everyday objects, such as a cereal box, aluminum foil, tape, and paper, to safely view the cosmic event.

Because the half of Earth that faces the sun is larger than the area of the shadow cast by the moon during a solar eclipse, observers may experience a total, annular, or partial eclipse.

Solar eclipses are a cosmic coincidence because the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun but about 400 times closer to Earth, allowing it to block sunlight for those on Earth within its shadow.

Some maps may incorrectly identify the boundaries of a solar eclipse's totality because they assume the Earth is a smooth surface.

Visualize the path of every solar eclipse from 1900 to 2099 and see what each looks like when observed from different locations on Earth.

View photographs of solar eclipses on Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn caused by the moons of these planets blocking sunlight.

Blood moons only occur during total lunar eclipses, when the Earth blocks the sun, but its atmosphere lets redder parts of sunlight through to reflect off the lunar surface.

Research shows that during total solar eclipses, some animals change their behavior to match their nighttime activities.

Global eclipse tourism is a multibillion-dollar industry, with the 2024 total solar eclipse across North America estimated to have generated $6B in economic activity across regions along its path.

A basic camera setup or a phone is enough to capture stunning aurora photos

Auroras result from solar particles interacting with atmospheric elements. This article provides tips on improving the quality of aurora photos taken with simple equipment and the best times and locations to yield better photos.

A composite of telescope images of the sun, which each reveal unique solar features

While traditional cameras can reveal sunspots—cooler regions on the sun's surface—in visible light, x-ray detectors can highlight explosions of high-energy plasma and magnetic fields known as coronal mass ejections. Hydrogen-alpha filters can reveal clouds and filaments of material suspended in magnetic fields above the sun's surface.

Every eclipse is preceded or followed by another eclipse, separated by about two weeks and alternating between solar and lunar types.

Over thousands of years, the frequency of solar eclipses is greatest around the Arctic and Antarctic Circles and lowest near the equator.

Although the moon passes between the sun and Earth each month, its orbit is tilted by five degrees, preventing Earth from experiencing a solar eclipse each month.

Electric grids that rely on solar power must compensate for reduced electricity generation during solar eclipses.

While the sun, moon, and stars rise and set from east to west due to Earth's rotation, the moon's eastward revolution around the Earth causes its shadow to move from west to east during a solar eclipse.

In 2025, the European Space Agency created the first artificial solar eclipse in space when one spacecraft cast a shadow onto another spacecraft to enable observations of the sun's outermost atmosphere.

Explore a guide to photographing auroras

Using a wide aperture and increasing your camera's native ISO to a value between 3200 and 8000, depending on atmospheric conditions, will help capture as much light as possible while freezing the movement of the auroras. The camera should also be kept as still as possible and in environments with minimal weather impediments, such as clouds.

Just before and just after a total solar eclipse, sunlight can pass through uneven terrain on the lunar surface, producing disconnected bits of light around the moon called Baily's beads.

Variations in the energy of light force the use of multiple telescopes

Just as Earth's atmosphere allows the sun's visible light to pass through while blocking other harmful radiation, telescope mirrors and other optics can only reflect, absorb, or transmit certain types of light. Detectors also utilize semiconducting materials that react to specific energies of light, thereby preventing a one-telescope-fits-all solution.

NASA's Near-Earth Object Surveyor can detect asteroids coming from the sun

Telescopes directed at the sun or lacking heat shields may become damaged, limiting our ability to monitor potentially dangerous objects coming from that direction. The NEO Surveyor is built to overcome this problem and spot asteroids that reflect as little as 5% of incoming light.

The majority of exoplanets—planets outside the solar system—have been discovered through mini-eclipses created when they pass in front of their host star and block some of its light from reaching Earth.

Explore a guide to observing comets

Binoculars or telescopes can be used to see vivid tails, glowing comas, and brief bursts of brightness from these celestial objects. For photography, a DSLR or mirrorless camera with a wide-aperture lens, long exposure settings, and accessories such as tripods and star trackers is recommended.

Learn about the sun's corona, which is nonlethal despite a temperature of millions of degrees

The outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere is best seen during a solar eclipse, when the moon blocks the much brighter (and significantly cooler) solar surface. Despite the high-energy particles in the corona moving fast enough to escape the sun's gravity and gradually become solar wind, their density is too low to contribute meaningfully to the region's overall radiation.

See a lunar eclipse share the night sky with the Milky Way

Photos taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile in March 2025 captured a blood moon and the Milky Way galaxy within the same field of view. The moon appears red from the bluer parts of its reflected sunlight being scattered by Earth's atmosphere.

Astrophotographer Vincent Bouchama's stellar photo archive

Astrophotographers specialize in collecting as much light from celestial objects as possible while minimizing the movement of the object they're capturing. It's a unique skillset—requiring unique tools—but the results are often universally...

Explore a gallery of lightning photography taken from the Grand Canyon

In this series, award-winning photographer Adam Schallau accompanies each image with expert advice on how to capture the phenomenon successfully. Initially requiring the shutter to remain open for extended periods, today's technology includes a device called a lightning trigger, which senses incoming lightning and automatically manages the shutter.

The selfie camera exists thanks to Einstein's discovery of the photoelectric effect

Smartphone cameras utilize sensors such as CMOS or CCD to capture light by converting it into electrical signals through the photoelectric effect. Einstein explained this effect by demonstrating that light behaves as both particles and waves simultaneously, a discovery that earned him the Nobel Prize in physics.

While solar eclipses were considered ominous throughout history, multiple cultures explained the celestial event as the result of mythical creatures nearly consuming the sun.

View historical records of solar observations and discoveries, from telescopes in the early 1600s revealing sunspots to NASA's Parker Solar Probe photographing the sun from within its outer corona in 2025.

Scientists validated Albert Einstein's theory of gravity by measuring the apparent positions of stars via their starlight as it traveled near the sun on its way to Earth during a total solar eclipse.

View a colorful gallery of solar features, including coronal loops and filamentary prominences, curated by the National Solar Observatory.

Proteins with limited light sensitivity prevent humans from seeing all types of light

Specialized photoreceptor cells in the retina called cones each possess photopigments that activate when exposed to three ranges of visible light. Other forms of electromagnetic radiation outside the activation range do not generate signals for processing in the brain, thereby limiting average human vision to approximately 10 million colors.

According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the first person to successfully predict a solar eclipse was the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus in 585 BCE, with the resulting celestial event ending a half-decade-long war.

Photography and video are prohibited in the Supreme Court—but artists are not

Because cameras are banned inside the Supreme Court of the United States, courtroom artists document proceedings through sketches. This exhibition features works from 1964 to today, capturing the human drama of landmark cases and shaping how Americans visualize justice.

NASA's guide to solar flares and how they work

Flares happen when the powerful magnetic fields in and around the sun reconnect. They're usually associated with active regions, and carry the potential to disrupt electronics on Earth.

In 1676, Danish astronomer Ole Rømer determined that light did not travel instantaneously by observing a delay in the appearance of solar eclipses on Jupiter when it was farther from Earth.

A photo's brightness can be controlled by the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO

Aperture refers to the size of the opening of the camera lens and controls the amount of light that reaches the sensor. Shutter speed impacts how long the aperture is open, while ISO affects the camera sensor's sensitivity to light.

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.

As seen in the dark region of the Horsehead Nebula, clouds of space dust can block some forms of light from reaching telescopes, impairing observations and data collection.

Vision experts generally don't recommend blue-light-blocking glasses because there's no scientific evidence that the light from computer screens damages eyes.

By identifying patterns in the periodic movements of the sun, moon, and Earth, ancient civilizations realized that identical eclipses repeat about once every 6,585 days, known as the saros cycle.

Scientists create contact lenses that give you infrared vision

Scientists have created lenses that use nanoparticles to convert infrared light into visible light, allowing human eyes to observe previously invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. This technology may help colorblind individuals by converting colors they cannot see into wavelengths they can.

The impacts of the solar maximum on Earth, from telecommunications to auroras

During the peak of the sun's 11-year cycle, plasma emissions stronger than the average stream of particles from the sun can compress and distort the Earth's magnetic field, allowing auroras to be seen farther from the poles. Distortions in the ionized layer of Earth's atmosphere can also alter the path of communication transmissions through the air. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

Understanding why charged particles from the sun protect Earth from more dangerous particles

The solar wind engulfs the solar system in a protective bubble called the heliosphere, which was first theorized in the late 1950s based on studies of cosmic rays—high-energy particles traveling through space at near light speed. The heliosphere shields the solar system from much of this ionizing radiation originating elsewhere in the Milky Way.

View media of the sun's south pole, taken for the first time in 2025

Captured in March 2025 by the Solar Orbiter—a satellite developed by ESA and NASA—the images and video are the first to be taken by an object not moving around the sun's equator. The orbiter moved outside the plane of the planets by using Venus to slingshot it into a tilted orbit, and the data it collected will help scientists better understand the sun's magnetic activity.

View the transparency of Earth's atmosphere and how it blocks most forms of light

The gases that make up Earth's atmosphere block most harmful forms of electromagnetic radiation from reaching the planet's surface, except for some ultraviolet light. Their transparency to radio waves means this form of light can reach Earth's surface, which is why most radio telescopes are ground-based rather than space-based.