I mean, given my photography skills, I was never actually going to capture the eclipse.

There are photographers who do this sort of thing properly. They own specialist filters, understand exposure when the principal light source in the solar system is temporarily obstructed by the Moon, and somehow manage to produce those astonishing images of the lunar disc passing majestically across the face of the Sun. I could have bought the necessary kit and spent a few days learning how to use it, but I knew exactly what would happen. I’d spend most of the eclipse staring at the back of the camera, fiddling with settings, worrying about focus, and eventually come home to discover I’d taken 400 photographs of a slightly fuzzy white blob.

So I decided not to bother. I’d take the camera because I rarely go anywhere vaguely interesting without it, but when the eclipse happened, I was going to watch it. With my eyes. Well, not directly with my eyes, obviously, because I’d quite like to keep using them afterwards, but you know what I mean.

A Perfectly Sensible Plan

This unusually relaxed attitude towards photographing the eclipse did not extend to deciding where we would watch it.

I’d spent ages scouting possible locations. Routes were plotted, timings considered, and traffic taken into account. My dad was coming with me, and as he’s knocking on the door of 80, there was also the small matter of working out how far we’d have to walk and how long we could reasonably sit in the August sun without turning a pleasant father-and-son astronomical outing into an incident requiring paramedics.

Eventually, I had a plan. It was researched, sensible, and, as far as I could tell, about as good as it was going to get.

Then Dad and I went for a walk at a local nature reserve, and the whole thing went out of the window.

We found another spot.

It wasn’t somewhere I’d seriously considered for the eclipse, but standing there and looking around, it suddenly seemed almost suspiciously perfect. There was easy access, plenty of open sky in roughly the right direction, and, perhaps most importantly, no obvious sign that several thousand other people were planning to descend on it with camping chairs and flasks.

Naturally, we couldn’t simply look at the sky and assume it would probably be fine. That would have been far too straightforward.

I started checking websites and maps. I found one that would plot the eclipse from our exact location and show the Sun’s position and elevation as it progressed. Dad got his compass out and started taking bearings. Before long, two grown men were standing in a nature reserve discussing solar elevation and compass headings to determine whether an object 93 million miles away would be visible above a hedge.

The calculations were conclusive. It would.

Plan A was immediately binned.

By this point, I’d also decided not to buy anything for the camera to photograph the Sun. Apart from the fact that photographing an eclipse safely isn’t something you want to improvise with a bit of cardboard and misplaced confidence, I increasingly liked the idea of simply experiencing it. There would be thousands of technically brilliant photographs of the eclipse taken by people who knew exactly what they were doing. The world really didn’t need another slightly out-of-focus one from me.

Ancient Astronomical Technology. Probably.

We did, however, have a piece of specialist astronomical equipment.

Sort of.

Earlier this year, in Tulum, Mexico, we’d bought a polished piece of obsidian, which, according to the bloke selling it, was based on something the Maya used to look at the Sun. Whether there was any historical truth in this, or whether we’d simply encountered a particularly accomplished salesman who’d spotted two tourists and a shiny black rock, I have no idea. We bought it anyway, brought it home and kept it as a souvenir, where it spent the following months doing very little to justify whatever we’d paid for it.

Then, in the late evening of 12 August 2026, the Mayan sun rock finally got its chance to shine.

Or, more accurately, to stop something else shining quite so much.

And bugger me, it worked.

We had proper eclipse glasses as well, and I’m certainly not suggesting anyone rummage in a drawer for an interesting piece of volcanic glass next time the Sun disappears. But through the obsidian we could clearly see the shape of the eclipse. There was something rather wonderful about standing in Wales, looking at the partially obscured Sun through a polished black rock we’d bought earlier that year, on the other side of the Atlantic. Whether it represented ancient Mayan astronomical knowledge or first-rate Mexican tourist bollocks almost didn’t matter. For that morning at least, it had earned its place in the house.

The location turned out to be every bit as good as we’d hoped. There were no enormous crowds, no traffic jams, and no frantic search for somewhere to stand. I don’t think there were more than twenty people there, scattered around with their eclipse glasses and various bits of equipment, all waiting for something that had been calculated down to the second, yet still somehow felt uncertain until it actually began.

Meanwhile, 93 Million Miles Away

There’s something peculiar about watching an eclipse, even when you know perfectly well what’s happening. There’s no mystery to the mechanics of it. The Moon passes between us and the Sun. We know precisely when it’s going to happen, and we can predict the same event far into the future. None of that quite prepares you for actually seeing a piece of the Sun disappear.

The light was what fascinated me most. With a partial eclipse the world doesn’t suddenly plunge into darkness, but something changes. It’s subtle enough that you can almost convince yourself you’re imagining it, yet the daylight doesn’t feel quite right. We spend our lives beneath sunlight without really thinking about it as a thing in itself. It’s just there. Then the Moon gets in the way of some of it, and you suddenly notice the quality of the light falling on everything around you.

This inevitably brings me to the cow.

I had the camera with me, and Highland cattle were nearby. At some point during the eclipse, I turned away from the greatest celestial spectacle visible from Britain that morning and noticed one of them standing in the altered sunlight.

At precisely that moment, other photographers were capturing the Moon as it passed majestically across the face of the Sun. They were photographing the strange light, the celestial mechanics of three worlds briefly aligning, and one of those rare occasions when the movement of the solar system becomes directly visible from a field on Earth.

I photographed a cow’s arse.

But not just any cow’s arse.

This was a Highland cow’s arse illuminated by sunlight that had travelled approximately 93 million miles, been partially interrupted by the Moon, and finally deposited itself upon the hairy backside of a Scottish bovine in a Welsh nature reserve.

And when you think about it like that, it becomes considerably more impressive.

Those photons had left the Sun roughly eight minutes earlier and crossed the solar system towards Earth. The Moon had intercepted some of them, casting its vast shadow through space, while the survivors continued on, entered our atmosphere, crossed Wales, and ended their extraordinary journey by illuminating several square feet of Highland cattle’s backsides. Photography is, after all, about light.

I pressed the shutter and created…

Bovine Penumbra: A Study in Hair, Light and Celestial Occlusion. A meditation on scale, transience, our place in the cosmos, and a cow’s arse.

An Important Contribution to Astrophotography

When we eventually came home and turned on the news, the decision to abandon the original plan looked even better. Several of the places I’d researched were exactly as busy as I’d feared, with crowds, traffic and all the usual chaos that erupts when thousands of people realise at roughly the same time that they’ve all chosen the perfect place to watch something.

Dad and I, meanwhile, had ended up watching the eclipse with no more than twenty other people at a place we’d discovered almost by accident while out for a walk. The carefully researched plan had been abandoned; the replacement had involved a compass, a collection of websites, and an improbable amount of discussion about the height of the Sun above a hedge. A dubious piece of Mexican obsidian had finally justified its existence.

Most importantly, we’d actually watched the eclipse rather than spending it trying to photograph it.

And I’d somehow come home with what may be the world’s only photograph of a Highland cow’s backside, lit by the partial solar eclipse of 12 August 2026. Which, when I think about it, is probably a much more accurate record of my day than any technically perfect photograph of the Sun could ever be.

There will be thousands of beautiful photographs of the eclipse.

Sharp ones. Dramatic ones. Properly exposed ones. Photographs taken with equipment costing more than my car.

But only one of them, as far as I know, asks the truly important question.

What does a cow’s arse look like during an eclipse?