A unique view of Baily's beads

This award-winning eclipse sequence reveals the Moon's rugged peaks

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An annular solar eclipse offers a rare chance to capture the famed 'ring of fire'. Taken a step further, you can capture a sequence of photos as the Moon moves into and out of the eclipse, ultimately revealing a silhouette of the lunar surface. This shadowy effect is created by gaps that appear between 'Baily's beads', spots of sunlight that form as the Moon's rugged surface rapidly moves across the Sun's edge.

Here I'll describe how I produced an image like this, 'Distorted Shadows of the Moon's Surface Created by an Annular Eclipse', which won 2024's Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. It offers a unique glimpse of the Moon's topography, thanks to Bailey's beads, during the October 2023 annular solar eclipse. Visible in a 10- to 15-second window, you need to set the camera to continuous burst mode at its highest possible frame rate to capture these beads. I took 34x 1/1000-second exposures with a Nikon D810 camera and a Sigma 150-600mm telephoto lens fitted with a solar filter. My start image (right) shows one of these single frames.