Just a few days ago, I was lucky enough to witness, with my own eyes (safely protected by a proper solar filter!), one of the most fascinating astronomical events visible from Earth: a solar eclipse. Eclipses are not particularly rare on a global scale, but their visibility strongly depends on geographical location. The path of a total solar eclipse covers only a relatively narrow region of the Earth’s surface, meaning that totality may return to the same location only after a very long interval. Solar eclipses have fascinated humans for thousands of years and are among the astronomical phenomena most extensively recorded by ancient civilizations. Historical observations from Babylon, China, Europe, and the Arab world are so valuable that they have even been used to investigate changes in the Earth’s rotation over the past several thousand years.
On 12 August 2026, a total solar eclipse crossed parts of the Northern Hemisphere. From the UK, where I currently live, totality was not visible, but a substantial partial eclipse could still be observed. Having a basic refractor telescope and a good observation point, I decided to try recording the entire event as a time-lapse. I invested in a suitable solar filter for my Bresser Arcturus 60/700 mm telescope. The telescope has no automatic tracking, so this meant manually following the Sun throughout the roughly two-hour event. Afterwards, I planned to use Python, computer vision, and ChatGPT to align and filter the recorded frames and reconstruct a smooth eclipse sequence.
But my interest in this event was not limited to photographic observation. I was also curious to extract quantitative information from the recorded frames and to investigate what was happening to the environment while the Moon progressively obscured the Sun. Changes in incoming solar radiation should affect quantities such as light intensity, UV radiation, and, potentially, temperature and humidity. I already had several Arduino boards and a collection of inexpensive sensors at home, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity to turn the eclipse observation into a broader experiment. The question behind the project therefore became: Could a simple telescope, a few low-cost sensors, and some Python code reveal not only the progress of a solar eclipse, but also how the environment responds to it? The answer was YES: it is possible, and it was pretty simple to set it up!
I have published an article on my Instructables website in which I outline the setup of my Environmental Solar Station (ESS), show what I measured during the eclipse, and suggest ideas for future development. In this post, I will instead give some information about the creation of the video on the YouTube channel embedded below.
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