Solar eclipse at Smith Rock, the story behind the viral photo

For over two minutes on 21 August 21, 2017 hundreds of millions of people between America, Europe and Africa stopped to observe the spectacular solar eclipse. Billions of photographs and videos document this extraordinary astronomical event, but some truly captured the imagination and immediately went viral across the internet. In particular those of rock climber Tommy Van Smith up on the famous Monkey Face, taken at 11:35 am by 31-year-old photographer Ted Hesser at the historic crag Smith Rock, Oregon, USA.

For obvious reasons these photographs recall the famous Moonwalk carried out by the late Dean Potter on the highline at Cathedral Peak in Yosemite which, if you haven’t yet seen, is well worth watching after having enjoyed this, we suggest you see after enjoying this "behind-the-scenes video" of this iconic total solar eclipse.

Best view in the house... it took 4 days of planning and hard work to capture this shot. My girlfriend @martinatib and good friend @thistommysmith climbed the route twice, in scorching heat, to nail the positioning. But we nailed it!

A post shared by Ted Hesser (@tedhesser) on Aug 21, 2017 at 12:40pm PDT