14/08/2026
August 12th 2026 Eclipse, seen from Musée du Louvre Musée du Louvre 🌒
On the eclipse day, we headed to the Louvre museum, between the Pyramide and the Pavillon Sully, facing west. Surprisingly (or maybe because of the 34°C temperature), the place was quite empty. A tripod, our eclipse glasses, an ugly diy solar filter made out of cardboard and masking tape, attached to a lens hood, with the idea to photograph the crescent sun at the top of the Pyramide. We pointed our lens towards the phenomenon to compose our shot, with the constant fear to burn our eyes or our cameras' sensors, or both. Few other photographers later joined the party. Fortunately, the filter protected our lens very well and made the eclipse very visible, unfortunately it darkened the scene too much : the pyramide was too dark and its silhouette could not pass in front of the eclipse. To get our shot, we should have shot without the filter, taking the risk to damage our precious working tools. Simon Wohlfahrt Simon Wohlfahrt did a stunning photo that looks like what we had in mind.
Anyway, we made a timelapse exclusively focused on the Sun. Every 18 second, a shot and we had to recompose everytime the Sun snuck out of the frame.
In the mean time, the other took photos of people facing the eclipse. It was quite difficult : very few people had glasses to enjoy the show (they were out of stock nearly everywhere and maybe because the government did not make any massive prevention campaign or a massive distribution, contrary to local initiatives that allowed people to assemble and took advantage of the phenomenon to educate people about astronomy).
Getting back to the timelapse, the result : 268 horizontal exploitable images of the Sun hidden by the Moon, that continuously tried to escape from the top left of our frame, to head to the bottom right corner of our screen. A long process of centering and stabilization allowed us to create both the collage of the Sun phases in the first slide and the video timelapse at the end.
We expecting nothing, yet were cheered by the results we got.
Generally, we enjoyed this communion moment and don't exclude shooting astrophotography in the future.