During a total solar eclipse, the moon partially covers the sun as seen from Mazatlan, Mexico on Monday, April 8, 2024.
In 1842, Italian physicist Gian Alessandro Majocchi was the first person to attempt photographing a solar eclipse. He used the daguerreotype technique to capture the eclipse, creating a highly detailed image on a sheet of copper plated with a thin coat of silver without the use of a negative. The first successful picture of a solar corona was taken on July 28, 1851, by Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski at the Royal Prussian Observatory in Königsberg with the aid of a telescope.
Annie Maunder, a Victorian-era female astronomer, came to India in 1898 to photograph a solar eclipse and captured an enormous ray-like structure appearing to burst from the Sun, known as a coronal streamer. In 1900, Smithsonian photographer Thomas Smillie documented a solar eclipse by rigging cameras to seven telescopes and successfully making eight glass-plate negatives. This was considered an amazing photographic and scientific achievement.
