Wesley's Tool-Box

While I've personally witnessed several solar eclipses before, none of them were total. So when I found out that one such occurrence would take place near a direct flight destination - Madrid, Spain - I seized the opportunity. Because Madrid was just outside the path of totality, I went to Segovia, a city about 70 km to the north, a day after my arrival. I scouted for a good location to observe the eclipse and eventually settled on a spot near Alcázar of Segovia. As you can see above, it was an excellent vantage point.

Since Segovia was a bit off from the "optimal" location, the totality would last just short of a minute, compared to nearly 2 minutes in some places. So that left less margin for error and thus I came prepared. Fortunately, my efforts paid off, and ended up shooting 35 photos of the totality, as well as several hundred of the partial eclipse. And I was able to do continuous shoots for the most part, except for a brief break where I had some issues with the tracker I brought. The entire sequence has been uploaded to YouTube.

Alcázar wasn't actually on the list of the candidate locations I had sorted out ahead of time using maps and online information. But when I visited the castle as a part of the city tour, I noticed that people were starting to set up telescopes and cameras around the area. So I knew something was up. After my candidate locations were deemed suboptimal, I took a taxi to return to Alcázar and found a free spot to set up my gear.

Based on my experiences, I realized that I needed a star tracker to keep the Sun within the view of the camera if I were to make continuous shootings. So I bought a lightweight tracker called Sightron Nanotracker for this task, which is visible as a white block just below the P1000 camera in the photo. I also wanted to record the changes in the environment and brightness during the eclipse, so the background was recorded as a time lapse video using my iPhone 16 Pro, perched on a separate, small tripod. Both did their job wonderfully.

Here are some other photos of the totality. This one was shot when the eclipse had reached its maximum, about 30 seconds into totality. The prominence on the left is still quite visible, and there's a smaller one on the top as well. The full breadth of the Sun's corona is beautifully displayed around the sphere.

This is one of the last photos of the totality, with a prominent "diamond ring" near the bottom. I instantly put the ND100000 filter back on the camera a few seconds after this to record the rest of the eclipse without damaging the sensor.

Device: Nikon CoolPix P1000
Settings: 1000mm - ISO 100 - 1/80s - f/5.6
Time: 2026-08-12 20:31 CEST (UTC+2)
Location: Segovia, Spain