The History of Eclipse Photography

Here lie the bodies of Ho and Hi
Whose fate though sad was visible,
Being hanged because they could not spy
Th’eclipse which was invisible.

Heigh ho! ’tis said, that being drunk
Thus brought them into trouble,
But surely this is incorrect,
As drunken folks see double!

—Book of Documents

Since the dawn of the Solar System, alignments have allowed the Sun to throw shadows onto its orbiting children. Even before life existed on Earth or when dinosaurs stomped around, eclipses temporarily darkened the planet. When humans arrived, with sharpening intellects and memories, these most unnatural phenomena captured our imaginations. From the get-go, we have been transfixed by Sol’s syzygies.

Perhaps apocryphal, two Chinese astronomers – Ho and Hi/Hsi – were executed because they did not predict the eclipse of 2137 BCE. The Book of Documents, a collection of ancient Chinese events (potentially) compiled by Confucius, illustrates that eclipses have been part of human consciousness for more than 4,000 years.

According to NASA, petroglyphs at Loughcrew Megalithic Monument in County Meath, Ireland, might push that date even farther back. The spiral- and circular-shaped drawings depict an eclipse on November 30, 3340 BCE.

To commemorate an eclipse in 1200 BCE, Chinese artists etched an interpretation on the bones of oxen and tortoise shells. The writers of the time noted, “The Sun has been eaten.”

Before the advent of photography, we relied on these writings and drawings to describe eclipses. Today, we have incredible technology to record eclipses. Sophisticated telescopes, cameras, lenses, and filters can document them from the ground, the sky, and space, all in stunning clarity. We can make detailed photographs, time-lapses, and videos that would stun humans from just a hundred years ago.

Yet something magical undoubtedly hides in the earliest images of eclipses.

In studying the 2026 total solar eclipse, I encountered this photograph by Carleton Watkins. On 11 January 1880, the artist scrambled up California’s Mount Santa Lucia with his camera and waited for the show that scientists predicted. [Editor’s note: Research shows the existence of no Mount Santa Lucia. The Santa Lucia Range does exist. Authoritative sources clearly indicate the peak Watkins climbed to be “Mount Santa Lucia.” This discrepancy is not a mistake. The highest peak in the Santa Lucia range was called Mount Santa Lucia in 1880. The crag received a new name in 1906. It’s now known as Junipero Serra Peak.] During totality, he only managed a single frame, but the result produces a spectacular, radiating black disc that hovers over a seascape of clouds, anchored by the dark silhouettes of mountaintop trees.

Despite its lack of color and a century and a half of camera advancements, this image pops with primal aplomb. You can see the disk bobbing on rolling waves, and the brightness of the corona zips right to our retinas.

It’s an astonishing artifact.

Other images from the era produce similar effects of both solar and lunar eclipses.

The Danish photo above was only rediscovered in 2016, as the Niels Bohr Institute located 300 lost astronomical images in its basement.

Perhaps the most famous eclipse photographs of all time were snapped by Arthur Eddington and Andrew Crommelin in 1919. They traveled to Príncipe, off the coast of Africa, and to Sobral, Brazil, to see the Sun for reasons not just artistic.

In 1916, Albert Einstein unleashed the General Theory of Relativity, a landmark framework for understanding how gravity and time play out in the cosmos. Though the mathematics all lined up, we really didn’t have a way to put the theory to the test. Eddington, a British astronomer, realized a total solar eclipse might give us a way to see if a star’s gravity could bend light, one of Einstein’s predictions.

The 1919 eclipse allowed scientists to push General Relativity to the limits. When the photographs came back, showing a deviation of “1 and three-quarters seconds of arc for a ray which has passed close to the sun,” Einstein was validated and became the most famous scientist on Earth.

As fantastic as these photos are, an even earlier era of documentation exists.

In 1860, Warren de la Rue photographed a solar eclipse and proved that the corona and prominences, the beautiful loops we see during the phenomenon, belong to the Sun and not the Moon. Seems odd today, but at the time it was an open question.

This photo brims with gnarly rawness.

In 1854, William and Frederick Langenheim snagged an incredible sequence of images, creating the first solar eclipse photos in North America.

The first image ever captured of a solar eclipse, though, predates photography. The medium’s precursor – the daguerreotype – blinked into being circa 1840. On July 28, 1851, Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski used a 2.4-inch telescope at the Königsberg Observatory to make an 84-second exposure on a daguerreotype plate.

The result is a stark, black hole of an eclipse.

As the youth are wont to say, this image has aura.

Literally and metaphorically.

These 19th-century snaps seem to exist at the perfect intersection of petroglyph and space telescope. They capture enough of the features we see in modern imagery to make them certain eclipses, but retain enough antiquity to seem like works of art instead of mere recordings.