Stunning Photos Capture Today’s Total Solar Eclipse

Spectacular images from today’s total solar eclipse show the Moon completely covering the Sun and revealing its elusive outer atmosphere, the solar corona.

NASA scientists photographed the eclipse during a special photo shoot on Wednesday, August 12. You can also watch the solar eclipse livestream. Images captured from Spain show the Moon blocking the Sun’s bright surface and plunging the daytime sky into darkness for around 90 seconds.

During totality, the Sun’s faint corona becomes visible around the Moon’s silhouette. The corona is the Sun’s outer atmosphere and is normally impossible to see without specialized equipment. It remains one of the Sun’s greatest mysteries because its temperature can reach millions of degrees—far hotter than the Sun’s visible surface—and scientists are still working to explain why.

In one remarkable telescope image taken through a solar filter, the Moon appears as a dark circle surrounded by delicate white rays of coronal light. On the left side of the image, a bright pink structure extends from the Sun’s edge. This is a solar prominence, a towering arc of plasma held above the Sun’s surface by powerful magnetic fields.

Solar prominences can stretch many times wider than Earth and remain visible across the vast distance between the Sun and our planet—about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers).

Another image captured just before totality shows a bright “Bailey’s bead” shining through a small gap between the Sun and Moon. This effect occurs when the final rays of sunlight pass through valleys and around mountains along the Moon’s uneven surface.

Today’s total solar eclipse followed a narrow path of totality—the track of the Moon’s darkest shadow across Earth. The path extended from near the North Pole through Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain. Viewers outside the path of totality saw a partial solar eclipse, with coverage reaching approximately 90% in parts of Europe and between 10% and 25% across the northeastern United States and Canada.

The sky show continues tonight with the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. Because the eclipse occurred during a new Moon—the only lunar phase when a solar eclipse can happen—dark skies may make it easier to spot as many as 75 meteors per hour.