Monument Valley: Annular Eclipse

“Once upon a time I was falling in love.  But now I’m only falling apart…”  Somehow “annular eclipse of the heart” just doesn’t sound right, does it?

Today was a relaxing day.  When on vacation, we usually want to “see it all” and then wind up exhausting ourselves by the end.  But we can’t do that on a long trip like this, so we are planning a day every week or so where we relax a little and don’t do a full day of sightseeing or driving.  Today we went for a morning hike through a box canyon near the campground, then came back to get caught up with email and internet stuff.

Around 5 pm, we drove the van over to the Monument Valley visitor’s center to set up for viewing the solar eclipse.  It’s an annular eclipse, which means that the moon is far enough from the earth so that it doesn’t block out the sun completely (a total eclipse), instead leaving just a ring of sunlight silhouetting the moon.  The “ring” is only visible from certain parts of the world, and Monument Valley happens to be right on the path.  From here it was the tiniest bit off-center, but still had a full ring around it.

Before we left Phoenix, we bought a few of these eclipse viewers.  They don’t look like much, but they did the trick of allowing us to view and photograph the eclipse as it happened.  We didn’t see anything like this on sale in any of the gift shops here, so we were glad we’d brought along our own.  We saw several people taking photos of it and viewing it from behind their iPads.  I guess that might’ve worked, too – if we had an iPad.  We’d be curious to see how their pictures turned out, though.  When we took photos without the filter it was just a wash of bright light with no detail discernable.

The eclipse lasted about two hours, but there were only a few minutes where the ring was fully visible.  We set up camp so we could watch the whole show, beginning to end.  We put out our table and chairs, ate dinner, and periodically checked on the eclipse and took photos right up until the end.  In order to take photos, Kevin had to hold the camera steady behind the eclipse viewer, so getting some good shots took a lot of trial and error.  Kevin sorted through the 250 or so photos to put together this cool collage of images.

As I said, we were there for the whole show and were still watching it well after most people had packed up and gone home.  Our diligence was rewarded with this awesome sunset while it was still eclipsing – now, there’s something you don’t see everyday!