Solar eclipse 2015: On Friday, everyone will screw up photographing the sun

Smartphones will struggle in the piercing bright light

Between 8.25am and 10.41am on Friday, London will experience a solar eclipse. By 10.52 your news feeds will be flooded with really bad photography of it.

We're used to seeing world events from every possible angle now thanks to social media, but this time smartphones are going to come up short.

While their cameras have improved hugely in recent years they still can't handle the Sun properly, making it appear in photos as a white blob with bleeding light and too much lens flare.

The fact that it's impossible to capture a defined edge to the star except at sunset makes it very hard to shoot an eclipse, where these lines are everything.

Attempts to capture the front and tail end of the eclipse will probably end in disaster, while the mid-eclipse might just about make for a decent photo, particularly if you're in an area where the eclipse is at the highest coverage.

Moreover people could end up damaging the lenses in their cameras on Friday, as they're not designed to be pointed directly at sunlight.

There is a way around this however (postage time permitting), with solar filters available online that limit the amount of light that goes through the lens, protecting the camera from the bright light.

It's also worth lowering the amount of light that the camera takes in if possible in settings – there's more on that and other tips for getting a remotely Facebookable photo of the eclipse here.