Anna Fifield:

I suggest that part of the reason so many have been disappointed with Obama is that their expectations were unattainably high, and also because his supporters, especially liberals, projected their hopes on to him with little regard for his innate pragmatism. West admits this but says Obama is partly to blame. “When you mobilise the legacy of Martin [Luther] King and put a bust of Martin King in the Oval Office, people elevate their hopes. Martin King is not just every brother,” he says. “It’s like a novelist being obsessed with Tolstoy or Proust and then he ends up writing short stories that can barely get into some middlebrow magazine. Hey, you got our hopes up man! I was expecting Proust or Tolstoy, instead it would barely get in Newsweek.”

a href=”http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2012/05/ring-of-fire/”>

Brian Jones:

The annular eclipse of 2012 just rolled through the Western United States and I, along with millions of my fellow human beings, made the journey across parts of the planet Earth in the American West to view a transitory astronomical sight. An annular eclipse is when the Sun and the Moon are precisely in line but because the Moon’s apparent diameter does not completely occlude the Sun. When this happens, a rim of the Sun shines around the shadow of the Moon creating an apparent ring of fire.

Most eclipses including annular eclipses occur over the ocean or over sparsely populated areas of the planet, so this was a relatively unique opportunity to photograph an annular eclipse from a relatively close place to home. This photo was made from South Central Utah about 20 miles West of Cedar City where I managed to find a place overlooking a valley with a nice view of the sunset in amongst the juniper trees.