Sunset Solar Corona Revealed in All It’s Glory During Total Solar Eclipse 2026 from Burgos

The Sun’s Corona

The Corona is extremely hot and dynamic, being the outermost layer of the Sun’s atmosphere, it reveals intricate fine structures of delicate details distorted by the strong magnetic fields. Specially, close to the Solar maximum which happened in 2025 (peak of 11 years cycle of activity), the plasma of the Sun’s corona features a lot of loops and wispy white streamers radiating into space. But due to an immense level of brightness it is only possible to see when the Moon is perfectly covering the Sun. Safe enough to enjoy with our naked-eyes, much more well prepared and efficient to comprise and accommodate a larger high dynamic range, than our cameras, which even nowadays can’t do it at once. This is why we need to cover around 14 stops in the dynamic range and probably even more would be best, but bracketing can help achieve this milestone. This year, we had an additional chalange, as the eclipse was very low at the sunset, in the worst region regarding atmosphere layers, although I was very well impressed with all the details revealed in the Corona on the final image. 

And why is so special ? Because not even SOHO in space, from NASA, can watch the inner corona of the Sun in white light. It only can see the most extensive part of the outer corona, using a coronagraph, from two solar radii distant of the Sun’s centre.

Why Eclipse HDR is so Challenging

Photographing a Total Solar Eclipse, is probably to most advanced and complex task in all of astrophotography fields, not only from preparing and planning which requires a bit of Mat to find the correct set of exposures according to your gear combination, ISO, lens aperture, right place to be, right time to start etc, etc, as well as from executing it in a stressful short amount of time. But also very hard and difficult to process in a time consuming task. First, because the Sun, the Moon and the stars have all different motions across the sky, which are evident in long focal distances and long exposures. Images must be aligned not on the Moon’s disc, not on the stars, and not even on the prominences (as it only works in shorter exposures), so to reveal the corona in full glory, images must be aligned on the coronal structures which are very hard and tricky, as they are faint, subtle and lacking of contrast, and they keep moving too on a lower speed. Noticeable though over the course of all bracketing, but inevitably negligible, for the final fusion in order to naturally reduce the presence of noise. And probably the most difficult final achievement, is to keep as much as possible, everything looking natural without overcooking it. It is a delicate balance between, contrast, light flow, color and detail which I tried to keep in mind and respect until the very end. I hope I did it! One thing I decided to keep, was the sunset colors that we actually get while viewing it with our own eyes, that golden glow on the Corona, was unique!!

Equipment and Exposures

The High Resolution image was captured with a Sigma lens at 600mm at f6.3, and a Nikon Z8 modified (Ha sensitive – not relevant for this type of TSE images) on Wave 150i mount. This time I only did 6 bracketed sequences of 9 shots each. The exposure time for each sequence bracketing was ranging from 1/125s, 1/60s, 1/30s, 1/15s, 1/8s, 1/4, 1/2s, 1s, 2s at ISO200, plus additional fast exposures of 1/4000 for C2 and C3 (Prominences and Baily’s Beads). The 90GB of images were acquired just for this setup, being thousand of them just for calibration frames such as flats, darks and bias. 

Angelbird AV PRO SE CFexpress B4 TB

To ensure a high frame rate and fast performance in recording the images, I kindly had the incredible support of Angelbird, which provided me two CFexpress B of 4TBs each, and all acessories as the card readers of 40MBs and 20MBs. They work incredibly well, at a speed of 3700MB/s nothing beats this performance in the world market. Once again, me deeply gratitude for your support Angelbird.

Above we can see a different rotation with north facing down, to help drive our attention to other regions of the image which containing incredible details visible in the medium and outter Corona.

Solar Corona HDR Masterclass

A comprehensive 172-page step-by-step PDF guide for full processing of an HDR Solar Corona from linear to non-linear stage. This Masterclass was presented for the first time live in Capture the Atlas Eclipse Summit event in Burgos, Spain, in 13th August 2026 for an audience of 100 photographers and eclipse chasers from around the world. It was then converted in this full PDF guide available for purchase, being the most advanced masterclass available on the market until now, on the step-by-step basis. For more details about the topics included and for purchase, please visit my shopify store, by clicking on the image below.

Fine Art Prints – Available to ORDER

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, and if you still want to support my work as an independent artist, you can buy this image as a Fine Art Print, a piece of Art to bring some magic to your sweet home! I will be deeply grateful for your kind support. I have created a special limited Edition of this Print supplied with a signed & numbered Certificate of Authenticity, global delivery with tracked & insured shipping, in a carbon neutral sustainable production, packaging and shipping. Explore the size options and prices by clicking on my Print gallery. Meanwhile, you can sign-up my newsletter to get early access of future Print releases.

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