Total Solar Eclipse 12/06/26 - Léon, Spain (travel blog)

So this year I traveled to Spain to see the total solar eclipse. It was quite the adventure, full of unexpected surprises. I used this website to check what places were statistically less likely to have clouds. I picked somewhere around Léon and booked an Airbnb there.

The first unlucky event happened when I got a message from my airbnb host, saying that my reservation was cancelled due to the house being sold. This happened just a few months before the eclipse. I rushed to see if other places where available, but as expected, almost everything was booked already. I was able to find a place in San Isidro ski resort. It was a bit expensive but I had no other choice.

A month or so before the eclipse I started looking for good places near San Isidro to shoot the eclipse from. I was pretty happy with this very high place. I also started training and doing some tests with my equipment.

I really wanted to get a close-up of the sun so I could have nice detail on the prominences and Bailey's beads. My only option was to use my 8 inch f/3.9 newtonian I usually use for deep sky. Totally overkill, but I had no other option. This meant that I needed to use my eq6 since the telescope was too heavy for my lighter eq5. This meant that I was looking at quite heavy baggage to bring along with me.

I also decided to use my Canon 6D instead of my ASI294mc pro since it seemed that most of the eclipse softwares were only compatible with DLSRs. I used this website to calculate the exposures for the different parts of the eclipse. I was able to calculate the exposure times for the partial phase, but the huge aperture of the telescope was a problem for near totality and totality, since it required exposure times faster than my camera could do. The solution was to artificially reduce the telescope aperture. I could do this by using the telescope cap by removing the cover on the small opening. This reduced the aperture to 750.5mm ÷ 55mm ≈ f/13.6 which gave me acceptable exposure times.

I picked SETnC as the software for automatically running the exposures. It was very aligned with my philosophy of letting the telescope do its thing automatically so I could enjoy the whole eclipse with my own eyes. It was easy to setup, test and use.

Some weeks before, I started testing the equipment. I printed this solar finder, which made rough framing really easy.

Training was easier than I thought. I was able to nail down the process in roughly do afternoons. The only real unknown was the exposure times, but I really didn't have a way to test it, so it was a matter of crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.

A few weeks went by and D day was getting closer. I kept anxiously looking at weather reports to see about cloud coverage. It varied a lot day to day which didn't help. But I was confident.

Then, we packed our bags and on the 11th of August we set sail to San Isidro. We stopped in Salamanca for some lunch and to do some sightseeing. All and all, counting with all the stops we did along the way, it was a whole day of driving and we ended up arriving at around midnight.

Then, the second problem. At around halfway there, I noticed that I forgot to bring the solar glasses (that I bought like almost one year beforehand ;_;). We went to countless pharmacies and opticians but no dice, the glasses were "agotados" everywhere. Nevertheless, we continued looking.

On the day of the eclipse, the forecasts weren't looking so great on the spot I picked. It was not terrible, but any amount of clouds was unacceptable for me. So I kept looking looking and ended up picking a spot in Cea, which according to the forecasts would have a predicted 0% cloud coverage.

During the day we explored around San Isidro stopping for sightseeing around the beautiful mountainsides. We started to see people camping and setting up tripods for the eclipse. For our surprise, we stumbled upon a group of Portuguese tourists which also traveled all the way there to see the eclipse. They were all incredibly nice and welcoming. They offered us coffee and we spend some time talking and nerding over the eclipse and photography. We mentioned that we forgot