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A Little-Known Photographer Captured the First Clear Image of a Total Solar Eclipse 175 Years Ago. Today, These Celestial Events Still Reveal the Mysteries of the Sun
Ever since that first daguerreotype on a light-sensitive metal plate, eclipse observations have continued to unveil the star’s corona and bring people together to experience the solar system’s majesty
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A total solar eclipse casts a shadow on the world. During this perfect celestial alignment, the moon passes between Earth and the sun, completely covering the star’s face. For a few minutes, in the path of totality, daylight disappears.
Animals begin to behave as they would at dusk: Crickets chirp and bees go back to their hives. People gather outside, experiencing the event together as they all look up.
Samantha Thompson, astronomy curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, saw a total eclipse for the first time in 2017. She was in South Carolina with her family. She and her mother both cried. “It was just the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen,” Thompson says.
The fleeting nature of these spectacular events adds to their allure. Totality can last from ten seconds to around seven minutes, and it happens somewhere on Earth only once about every 18 months, on average. But capturing a total eclipse with a camera can freeze that moment forever in astronomical history.
The first successful image of a total solar eclipse was taken in the 19th century—a daguerreotype by Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski. This early photography technique produced a single, one-of-a-kind image on a silver-coated piece of copper treated with light-sensitive chemicals. It was introduced in the late 1830s by its namesake, French artist and scientist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre.
Working in what was then Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), Berkowski immortalized eclipse totality on July 28, 1851. He used a refracting telescope with a 2.4-inch aperture and exposed a daguerreotype plate for 84 seconds as the moon passed in front of the sun.
Not much is known about Berkowski. Science historian William B. Ashworth Jr. called him a “man so nearly anonymous that until very recently, we didn’t even know his full name.” According to Ashworth, Berkowski’s name didn’t appear in its entirety until 2013 in a German article. But nevertheless, Berkowski’s photography cemented a new era of eclipse fascination. As Ashworth wrote, “Solar astronomy would never be the same.”
“Astronomers generally associate the event of July 28, 1851, with the first full-blown professional eclipse expedition,” wrote astronomer and anthropologist Anthony Aveni in his 2017 book, In the Shadow of the Moon: The Science, Magic and Mystery of Solar Eclipses. Those early watchers “recorded naked-eye observations of the ‘splendid pink’ prominences and produced excellent drawings of the corona,” wrote Aveni.
“The eye is an incredible camera, because it has a very high dynamic range,” says astronomer Shadia Habbal at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy.
Now, 175 years later, our photographs may be much more advanced but our enchantment with eclipses is as powerful as it always was.
“It’s one of those natural things where people have seen it and described it throughout history, I mean, I think dating back to something like 3000 B.C.,” says Kelly Korreck, NASA’s eclipse program manager.
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In 1992, researchers discovered a Pueblo rock carving in New Mexico that might depict the 1097 total eclipse—potential physical proof of just how long humans have been looking to the heavens and documenting eclipses.
Astrophotography is notable because those pictures become part of the permanent record, says Kimberly Arcand, a visualization scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO). “Images can tell stories across generations,” says Arcand, and because of that, “we are able to create moments that last beyond that just very ephemeral, little, tiny piece of time.” The eclipse photograph from 1851 still teaches us about the cosmos, she says.
Quick facts: Harvard’s astronomical repository
- The Harvard Plate Stacks form the world’s largest assortment of astronomical glass-plate photography.
- Established in 1886, the institution’s collection now holds more than 550,000 glass-plate negatives and spectral images of the cosmos.
For solar scientists, total eclipse images produce crucial data on the corona, the sun’s outermost atmosphere. The sun is so bright that the wispy filaments of its corona are visible to the human eye only during a total eclipse—or when looking through a coronagraph, an instrument that attaches to a telescope and blocks most sunlight.
Eclipses have “formed the backbone of my career at this point,” says SAO astrophysicist Jenna Samra, who builds instruments to examine the sun’s corona. “I got involved in eclipse research to try to take advantage of this natural phenomenon that gives us this great opportunity to study the corona and produces some of the best data.” She recently built a coronagraph for the first time, which will eventually go up on a balloon to the stratosphere and observe the corona from there.
By studying the corona, researchers take note of how the sun creates space weather, the outflow of charged particles and magnetic fields that can interact with Earth’s magnetosphere, cause auroras and damage satellites. Viewing the sun’s outer atmosphere can also reveal coronal mass ejections, the star’s giant plasma expulsions. Some total eclipse images, taken with various wavelength filters, can even help determine the temperature and speed of the corona’s solar material.
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Total eclipses offer a natural laboratory for viewing the corona, but because they don’t last long and happen relatively infrequently, some scientists have started making artificial eclipses with a double-satellite formation.
The project, called Proba-3, is a first-of-its-kind European Space Agency mission that uses one satellite to block the sun’s light from another, located 492 feet away. The mission was launched in December 2024, and so far, its longest artificial eclipse duration was about five and a half hours, says solar physicist Andrei Zhukov at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, a principal investigator of the project’s coronagraph.
“It’s extremely rare to have two total eclipses during the same calendar year,” Zhukov says. But last year, he adds, Proba-3 produced more than 50 artificial eclipses.
Even with these innovations, Zhukov says the natural eclipse is best for observation. “The natural one is still better quality, because the moon is so far and it covers a little bit less than what we cover with Proba-3,” he says. “So still, if you compare two images, I would still prefer a total eclipse on the ground.”
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Habbal studies solar wind and has been traveling the globe observing and imaging total eclipses since the mid-1990s. She and her team scout the best locations for scientific observations, and on her journeys, she must contend with geopolitics, difficult weather and landscapes, and intense organizational processes. She’s even been close to dangerous animals. In 2001 in Zambia, she saw hippopotamuses near her campground. “Fortunately, nobody got hurt,” she says. On the Norwegian islands of Svalbard in 2015, she feared running into polar bears.
Despite the challenges, these endeavors continue, because they are undertaken in pursuit of a much larger goal: understanding the sun, our most important resource. Photography and videography are essentially the only ways to truly record an eclipse, Habbal notes. Astronomers once relied on the daguerreotype and sensitive glass photographic plates which needed time to develop. But today, she explains, “you can more or less see your data right away after the eclipse, and you can work with it more easily.”
The science is “so compelling,” she says, “because each image, each new eclipse, gives us new ideas.”
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The path of totality for this year’s eclipse, on August 12, goes through Greenland, Iceland and Spain, among other locations. Habbal will be in Spain to observe it. She was recently in Tunisia, scouting for next year’s total eclipse, which will be “the longest one of the century,” Korreck says, “closer to six minutes of totality.”
After years of eclipse chasing, interacting with many people and cultures, the human element of observing the phenomenon means a lot to Habbal. “You get exposed to the common human fabric,” she says. “We might look different, we might speak differently, but at the end of the day, we’re all human beings, and that comes through really strikingly when you go to different countries.”
Thompson considers how important it was for people in ancient civilizations to share their knowledge of the sun and to understand why, during eclipses, “suddenly, the sun goes away; this thing that you are most reliant on, goes away.”
In addition to awe, many people feel fear during solar eclipses. Even the origin of the word eclipse, from ekleipsis in Greek, “implies fear,” wrote Aveni, adding that “it means ‘failure,’ in the sense of something going wrong. Seeing an eclipse leaves you breathless, even if you know what’s going on.”
Gaining more insights can quell some of the fear, and eclipse visuals are part of that. “I think photography is carrying on that tradition, too, of passing down these stories of what we’ve learned,” says Thompson.
While few people outside the field of astronomy get to directly observe total eclipses with advanced telescopes and machinery, Arcand notes that sharing the results of that research through pictures can help communicate complex ideas, inspire curiosity and invite everyone into the discovery process.
“An astronomical image has a scientific lifetime far, far longer than the technology that was used to create it,” Arcand says. And the 1851 daguerreotype, she adds, “is a perfect example of that.”