Solar Snap

The best tel

Stuck a piece of an eclipse sunglass on my iPhone camera and took awesome photos of the partial eclipse from my backyard! Great for moon photos!

a. Great app! I used it to photograph the annular solar eclipse from the suburbs of Albuquerque. I left the kit at home. I used the app on an iPhone 13 Pro. My wife used the app on an iPhone X. We each used an improvised filter cut out from approved, silvered solar viewing glasses. The material caused an orange color and some haloes. What worked well. The autofocus worked great! I did not need to lock it. I could not photograph the sunspot that we saw through binoculars but that may have been the filter. The partial 60-sec timer. Changes. For some of us, the Zoom and Exp buttons got stuck on the left edge and needed tapping a few times. Maybe make them a few pixels bigger. Put the time on the screen so that we do not have to close the app to see the time. Annular eclipse is a bit over exposed even at the lowest exposure but that may be our filter. b. Combined with a suitable filter, it provides easy adjustment of the zoom, exposure, and focus. There is a button to take photos at regular intervals, an intervalometer. It worked well during the 2023 annular eclipse. You can temporarily attach an approved filter material to the phone using masking tape or binder clips! c. In April 2024, we got the filter kit. It went on easily and the Velcro pad stayed on the back of the phone. After you put on the filter, turn up the screen brightness. Now you can see the dim image onscreen while squinting towards the partially eclipsed sun and the bright sky! It was too cloudy to use the app. d. Try a zoom from near 4 to 15 and exposure near -2. For each eclipse, the autofocus worked well and we did not have to manually adjust focus. e. Unclear which lens it uses on a multi-lens phone. For example, for a 6X zoom does it use the 2X lens and 3X optical zoom or 5X lens and 1.2X digital zoom?