Burning Ring of Fire

It’s been a long and interesting day.  At one o’clock this morning I was chatting at a room party with astronaut Mike Fincke.  At dawn I was lost in Washington D.C., circling the Washington Monument (a lovely sight, actually).  At noon I was landing at the Albuquerque Sunport, and shortly before sunset I was eating chilled shrimp and lobster mac and cheese, and also watching and photographing this annular eclipse of the sun.

You could see the mountains of the Moon silhouetted against the sun.  Sunspot activity and solar flares were visible through our Astroscan telescope (the same scope featured prominently in The Rift.)

Since I last posted, I visited the homes of several presidents, checked out a number of Civil War battlefields, hosted the Nebula Awards, offered a morning workshop to writers, and guided a number of colleagues through the Air and Space Museum (ably assisted by Mike Fincke, who fortunately had more to offer than “I built a scale model of this airplane when I was nine,” which was pretty much all I had to say).

More on all this later.  Right now, I’m just a little bit fatigued.