Solar eclipses are often once-in-a-lifetime shots, but mix the celestial event with extreme sports, and photographers have mere seconds to get the shot. That was certainly the case when photographer Noah Wetzel set out to capture a photo of a wingsuit flyer crossing in front of the 2026 eclipse.
The photograph freezes Red Bull athlete Mike Brewer crossing the total eclipse in a wingsuit, traveling at more than 150mph (241kph) and only 15 feet (4.5m) above a ridgeline over a remote desert near Madrid, Spain, near sunset on August 12.
While solar eclipses happen somewhere on Earth around every 18 months, the August 12 eclipse was unusual not just because it was the first total eclipse that Spain has seen since 1905, but because the moon passed over the sun just near sunset.
The sun and moon tend to appear the largest when closest to the horizon, so the timing of the 2026 eclipse in Spain meant Wetzel could play with forced perspective – an optical illusion that makes objects appear larger – and extreme telephoto optics in order to make the eclipse seem larger than life.
Telephoto lenses will make the sun and moon appear larger, but for this shot, just one telephoto lens wouldn’t do. Wetzel used the Canon EOS R5 Mark II with two interconnected Canon 600mm f/4 L IS USM lenses, setting up nearly a mile away from the path of the wingsuit flight.
While the lenses would help the eclipse appear larger in the frame, the eclipse presented another problem: almost complete darkness. Wetzel set up a complex wireless flash system on the plateau to help freeze the action of the wingsuits and prevent a silhouette.
Wetzel would only have 84 seconds to get the shot – a photograph that is the result of nine months of planning and 600 hours of practice and test runs. The team also did a test run at dawn in Utah that required rafting to the location and hiking up a mountain in the desert. A local wingsuiter – Dani Román – also helped with the planning and flew that day as well.
“I can’t express how insanely challenging that was to line up that photograph,” Wetzel said. “I couldn’t be more stoked with the result. That is as good as it gets and has to be one of…if not the most complex, precise, and pressure-saturated photographs ever captured. That took everything I had in me, and I can honestly say I will probably never pursue another photograph on that level in my career again.”
The photograph wasn’t Wetzel’s first jaw-dropping eclipse photo – he previously won a Red Bull Illume award in 2019 for an eclipse shot with a mountain biker.
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