Ring of Fire

Most people go about their daily life with out realizing all the cosmic events happening above them. In ancient times whole societies were driven by the motion of the sun and planets as things like stonehenge and the Mayan temples attest. Solar and lunar eclipses usually were significant events in these societies but today the only people that care about these events are professional and amateur astronomers. I am the geek trifecta, computer programmer by profession, bike nerd in my free time, and casual astronomy geek. So when there was a annular eclipse of the sun visible in the US I decided to plan a vacation around it. My wife and I have been wanting to visit the southwest of the US for a while anyway so the annular eclipse just made us do the trip on a certain date.

The great thing about this eclipse was that it was going to be visible from Albuquerque which usually has over 350 days of clear skies a year. This meant that I had a very good chance of seeing the eclipse. An annular eclipse is different from a total solar eclipse in the fact that the moon doesn't completely cover the sun but instead leaves a ring of light around the moon at the point of maximin eclipse. This is normally called the "Ring of Fire".

I'm still on vacation and just have my iPad with me so it is hard to edit and post all the pictures I took but even if I could it would not convey the coolness of seeing the eclipse live. I observed the eclipse from a university parking lot with a couple hundred astronomy geeks. The astronomy society of Albuquerque hosted the event and did a great job of finding a good location for viewing the eclipse and providing bathrooms, traffic control and other logistics. The thing that made the even more fun was sharing it with a bunch of like minded geeks.

The eclipse started with the moon slowly covering the bottom right corner of the sun and then slowing working its way across it over about an hour. As the moon got close to covering the sun it slowly formed the ring. The ring lasted for just under 4 and a half minutes until it moved out the top left. When the ring first became visible the crowd let out cheers which lasted until the ring disappeared. At this point the sun was getting low in the horizon so we only were able to watch it for another 30 mins before it set. This means we didn't get the see the end of the eclipse but that really didn't matter.

I'm really glad I got a chance to see this and can't wait until 2017 when there will be a total eclipse of the sun that will be visa lie from the east coast.

P.S. I'm back from vacation and have had time to process all the pictures. Click Here to see all the eclipse photos. I also put together this mosaic below which shows most of my best shots.