I suspect all of our readers will be aware that last Saturday there was an eclipse event over the US. At 9:30 am Tucson Time was the peak of the annular eclipse, an eclipse where the moon is at the furthest point on its orbit, called apogee, so the disk of the moon is a smaller angular size on the sky than the sun (where normally they are essentially the same size) so it doesn’t block the whole disk and you can’t see the corona. Instead you get a “ring of fire” caused by the moon’s antumbra on the Earth’s surface.
Tucson was not in the area of max shadow, it only got about 80% coverage. So some XWCL members traveled to regions getting the full antumbra effect.
I met up with XWCL alum Lauren Schatz and UA OpSci grad Silvana Ovaitt. When Lauren was at XWCL she was my hiking and camping buddy, so we reunited for more L&L adventures by camping in Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park!
We also went on a backcountry guided tour off the public access road and led by a local named Larry
Song of the day is Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden.