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The reason for taking our tour to Hawaii in June 2012 was to witness a rare Transit of Venus but the tour incorporated much more for those interested in astronomy. The night of the 3rd/4th June saw the group setting up their cameras and telescopes outside the hotel to see a partial eclipse of the moon. Whilst lunar eclipses aren’t particularly rare events it made up an interesting trio of alignments that must surely be the greatest number of astronomical events in one tour, coming after the annular eclipse of the Sun in the US and ahead of the transit of Venus.

After a couple of nights in Iceland’s capital Reykjavik our first group of northern lights chasers flew north to Akureyri yesterday before travelling by coach to our base at Skuttustadir on the Southern shores of Lake Myvatn. During the day snow fell coating the landscape in a beautiful blanket of white giving us a real sense of the Arctic we had come to see.

I could hardly have timed my holiday to Egypt’s Sinai coast any better. After days and nights of clear skies, watching the waxing moon and bright planets Jupiter and Venus dominate the night sky, the evening of 10th December arrived and we pulled up sun-loungers on the beach to watch the moon rising over the Arabian Peninsula. Unfortunately, we weren’t quite far enough east to catch totality but the moon rose with just a thin crescent illuminated and the main body of the moon still in the Earth’s shadow and pale red.

As the time to next year’s eclipse ticks by I thought I’d share some more thoughts and images from my reccie trip last May. 

Leaving Bryce Canyon I travelled eastwards along Scenic Byway 12 to Moab passing through grand and ever changing landscape including Capitol Reef NP, Boulder Mountain and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.