Annular eclipse report from Imelda Joson and Ed Aguirre

Posted by David Eicher
on Monday, May 21, 2012

A beautiful sequence of the annular eclipse. All photos by Imelda Joson and Edwin Aguirre.
Here’s an eclipse report from yesterday by Imelda Joson and Edwin Aguirre, two good friends and expert astroimagers. I’ll continue posting a few of these as they roll in from readers. It was mostly cloudy and disrupted here in Waukesha, Wisconsin, but some observers in the area caught glimpses of the partial eclipse. And I know that many of you farther west saw a fantastic annular event.

Keep looking skyward!

Here’s the report by Imelda and Edwin:

Success in the high desert!

Horseshoe Bend on the Colorado River.
Two weeks of careful (and stressful) planning — from analyzing weather statistics to evaluating the annular eclipse’s visibility and duration, as well as the accessibility of the various observing locations — paid off with a successful photo expedition to Page in northern Arizona, close to the Utah border.
 
The site was the Horseshoe Bend Overlook, where the Colorado River makes a spectacular 270° turn in the Glen Canyon. The elevation here is around 4,300 feet (1,300 meters) above sea level.
 
The sky was perfectly clear in Page throughout the hot day. Because the Horseshoe Bend Overlook happened to be less than a half mile from the eclipse track’s central line, the more than 600 amateur astronomers and tourists gathered at the site witnessed a perfectly concentric solar “annulus,” or ring, during mideclipse at 6:35 p.m. local time, with the Sun about 10° high in the northwestern sky.
 
Imelda Joson and her telescope, ready for the eclipse.
Edwin Aguirre and his scope, ready for action!
More details and pictures will follow in our next report. Stay tuned!

Imelda and Edwin

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