Can Bitcoin become a real currency? Here’s what’s wrong with El Salvador’s crypto plan

June 13, 2021 

Salvador Melendez/AP


Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, has got himself a pair of laser eyes – on his Twitter profile at least.

Laser eyes are something social media users give themselves to show they love cryptocurrency – and Bukele proved his crypto-enthusiasm last week by having El Salvador become the world’s first nation to make Bitcoin legal tender.

El Salvador’s parliament passed Bukele’s proposed legislation on June 9, after he announced his plan just a few days earlier. The law will take effect in September.

Some Bitcoin fans have leapt on this as a step towards much broader acceptance. But the changes in Bitcoin’s market value since Bukele announced his plan gives crypto-sceptics reason for doubt.

Nayib Bukele’s Twitter profile image. Twitter

Over the past week Bitcoin’s value was as high as US$38,200 (about A$49,000) and as low as US$31,428. Over the past month it has fallen from more than US$58,000. This isn’t the type of price volatility any government generally wants to see in a currency.

Such fluctations show Bitcoin’s weakness as a viable alternative to central bank currencies – good only for transactions you don’t want traced and as a speculative investment.

So what is Bukele thinking in wanting to make Bitcoin legal tender for the small central American nation (population about 6.5 million) whose economy accounts for less than 0.05% of global GDP?

Read more: El Salvador's façade of democracy crumbles as president purges his political opponents

What does ‘legal tender’ mean?

Before we get to that, let’s clarify what making Bitcoin legal tender means.

Using Bitcoin is already legal in El Salvador, as it is in most countries. If you want to pay for something in bitcoins, and the recipient is willing to accept them, it’s all good.

Making bitcoins legal tender mean a payee will have to accept them. As the new legislation states, “every economic agent must accept Bitcoin as payment when offered to him by whoever acquires a good or service”

.

El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly votes to pass the Bitcoin Law. Miguel Lemus/EPA

El Salvador making this move isn’t as significant as it would be for most nations, because it is one of about a dozen countries – most of them micro-states such as Andorra and Nauru – without its own currency (or a common currency such as the Euro).

El Salvador abandoned its own currency (the “colon”, named after Christopher Columbus) in 2001 and adopted the US dollar as its legal tender. This process of “official dollarisation” was seen as a reform that would curb inflation and increase trade with the US (by far its major trading partner).

So El Salvador has less to lose than other nations in adopting a second currency as legal tender. There is no controversy about losing sovereignty and monetary policy autonomy. There will be no loss of “seignorage” – the profit made on issuing currency that’s worth a lot more than the cost of making it.
Highly volatile

But having two legal tenders will complicate matters – particularly when one of those currencies is subject to wild swings in its value.

Consider the provision in the new law that “all obligations in money expressed in USD, existing before the effective date of this law, may be paid in bitcoin”.

Even that is complicated. How, and by whom, will the amount of bitcoins necessary to pay a debt be determined? Will it be based on the Bitcoin price at the time the debt was incurred, or when the debt falls due?

The difference of even a few days could be significant.

If the expectation is the price of Bitcoin is going to rise, why would you want to buy things with it? Why not wait? If the expectation is the price is going to fall, why would you want to accept it? For most transactions, using US dollars will still make the most sense.

Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele at a press conference in San Salvador, June 4 2021.

 Rodrigo Sura/EPA

So making Bitcoin legal tender could help destabilise El Salvador’s economy.

Read more: Bitcoin: this year I stand to make $200 million more than Elon Musk
Increasing El Salvador’s GDP

Things would have been simpler if El Salvador had adopted a “stablecoin” whose price is fixed at one US dollar – such as Tether, the third-largest cryptocurrency.

But that would have not been nearly so newsworthy, and would have defeated the apparent reason Bukele has championed this move.

Bukele’s reasoning, delivered via Twitter on June 6, is that Bitcoin has “a market cap of US$680 billion” and:


If 1% of it is invested in El Salvador, that would increase our GDP by 25%.

This argument – which appears to be the only “analysis” Bukele has made public – seems very confused

.

Bukele explains his Bitcoin plan on Twitter. Twitter

Market capitalisation typically refers to a listed company’s valuation, based on multiplying the share price by the number of shares. The $US680 billion Bitcoin market cap Bukele referred to represents the currency’s market value multiplied by the number of bitcoins created so far. (For comparison, the market cap of Tether’s 63 billion coins in circulation is US$63 billion.)

But it is flawed logic to think Bitcoin’s total market value equals money bitcoin owners around the globe are looking to invest anywhere.

In very few cases do people buy bitcoins to invest in other things. Bitcoins are their investment. Neither major funds nor average punters holding bitcoins are likely to want to start investing in El Salvador.

Nor is foreign investment a component of GDP (which is the value of market transactions in an economy). Foreigners using bitcoins to buy assets such as land in El Salvador would bid up its price but not necessarily increase GDP. A surge in foreign investment into new infrastructure and businesess that increase productive capacity would contribute to GDP, but there’s no reason to think giving Bitcoin legal tender status will make this more likely

.
A street market in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. It’s questionable that buyers and sellers of most goods and services will want to use Bitcoin. Miguel Lemus/EPA

Facilitating remittances

A second reason given by Bukele is that Bitcoin “will have 10 million potential new users” and is “the fastest growing way to transfer 6 billion dollars a year in remittances”.

This apparently refers to both the population of El Salvador (about 6.5 million) and Salvadorans living abroad, many of whom send money home to help their families. In 2020 these remittances totalled US$5.9 billion, or 23% of El Salvador’s GDP.

While any cryptocurrency can well facilitate more efficient transfers (without the charges banks impose), the significance of remittances to the Salvadoran economy points to another issue. El Salvador is a poor country, with one of the lowest rates of internet use in the Americas – 33% in 2017, according to World Bank data.

How many vendors, street hawkers or farmers are equipped to handle cryptocurrency transactions? US dollars will more than likely remain the default currency.

The benefits of making Bitcoin legal tender are far from clear. El Salvador is already facing higher interest rates as international investors are worried about the move. There are concerns wider use of Bitcoin will facilitate the black economy and make tax avoidance easier.

So this is a great experiment.

Read more: Bitcoin: El Salvador's grand experiment

For the sake of El Salvador’s people, let’s hope it is successful. But the odds are on it being further evidence of the cryptocurrency’s unsuitability for use as a real currency – confirmation that Bitcoin is nothing more than a speculative gamble.

JOHN HAWKINS

Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society and NATSEM, University of Canberra

Disclosure statement
John Hawkins formerly worked for the Bank for International Settlements and two central banks,

THE CONVERSATION

Breaking Up Big Tech In Focus As New U.S. Antitrust Bills Introduced

By CPI

-June 13, 2021

By Diane Bartz, Reuters

A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced four bills on Friday aimed at reining in the power of the tech giants, with one potentially leading to their break-up.

Two of the bills address the issue of giant companies, such as Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google, creating a platform for other businesses and then competing against those same businesses.

One measure bans platforms from owning subsidiaries that operate on their platform if those subsidiaries compete with other businesses – potentially forcing the Big Tech firms to sell assets.

“From Amazon and Facebook (FB.O) to Google and Apple (AAPL.O), it is clear that these unregulated tech giants have become too big to care,” said U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat and sponsor of this measure.

The pro-business U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it “strongly opposes” the bills’ approach. “Bills that target specific companies, instead of focusing on business practices, are simply bad policy … and could be ruled unconstitutional,” the Chamber’s Neil Bradley said in a statement.

In contrast, Robert Weissman, president of advocacy group Public Citizen, said “Big Tech’s unchecked growth and dominance have led to incredible abuses of power that have hurt consumers, workers, small businesses and innovation. That unchecked power ends now.”

Representative David Cicilline, the Democratic chair of the antitrust panel, is an original co-sponsor of the bills, as is the top Republican, Ken Buck. The chair of the Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler, also sponsored the bills.

A second measure would make it illegal in most cases for a platform to give preference to its own products on its platform with a hefty fine of 30% of the U.S. revenue of the affected business if they violate the measure.

Continue Reading…

Japan To Probe Apple, Google On Antitrust Concerns

By

 CPI

 -

June 13, 2021

Apple is set to face more scrutiny of its business practices as the Japanese government is said to be preparing another antitrust probe into both tech giants Apple and Google, the media reported.

According to AppleInsider, Apple has been the subject of multiple antitrust probes alongside other tech giants, including Google.

It seems that Japan will be adding its own investigation to the pile soon, one that will affect both the iPhone maker and the search giant.

A government panel will apparently launch this month to look into tightening antitrust regulations, according to sources of Nikkei in a report seen by the Mercury News.

The panel will discuss the dealings of Apple and Google with Japanese smartphone producers, including whether they handle domestic companies fairly compared to overseas vendors.

It is believed that iOS and Android make up more than 90 per cent of the Japanese smartphone market, according to the report.

An analysis by IDC in February pointed to Apple selling nearly half of all mobile phones in the country for the entirety of 2020.

The alleged Japanese probe will become the latest in a long line of similar activity by governments and regulators around the world, seeking to curtail the power of tech giants like Apple.

 

ELEMENTARY CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Another US Chicken Producer Charged With Price-Fixing

By

 CPI

 -

June 10, 2021

Claxton Poultry Farms has been indicted in Colorado on charges of price-fixing broiler chickens produced for sale to restaurants and grocery stores, the US Justice Department announced.

The company’s president, Mikell Fries, and vice-president, Scott Brady, were previously indicted for their roles in a nationwide conspiracy to fix chicken prices from 2012 to 2019.

If found guilty, Claxton could be fined US$100 million, or twice what it gained from participating in the price-fixing.

Claxton, which is based in Georgia, sells 300 million pounds of chicken annually to 750 customers, including major chains, according to its website.

In February, Pilgrim’s Pride, one of the largest US poultry producers, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to pay US$107.9 million to settle federal charges that it conspired to fix chicken prices and passed on the costs to consumers and other purchasers. It is owned mainly by Brazilian meat packer JBS.

CAPITALI$M IS CRISIS
Toshiba changes board nominees as two step down in deepening crisis

Makiko Yamazaki
Sun, June 13, 2021


The logo of Toshiba Corp. is seen next to a traffic signal atop of a building in Tokyo

By Makiko Yamazaki

TOKYO (Reuters) - Toshiba Corp, facing a deepening crisis over corporate governance, said on Sunday it will change its board director nominees for an upcoming shareholder meeting, as two are stepping down.

The shake-up follows an investigation that found the company had colluded with the Japanese government to pressure foreign investors, a revelation that its second-largest shareholder called the greatest corporate governance scandal in the world in the last decade.


The report was commissioned by shareholders, who voted in March for an independent investigation into allegations investors had come under pressure from the company.

Audit committee chair Junji Ota and audit committee member Takashi Yamauchi will retire as board directors, the company said in a statement, following a four-hour long emergency board meeting.

Toshiba's audit committee has come under scrutiny as the investigation alleged the committee failed to take any action even when it became aware of Toshiba's attempt to prevent shareholders from exercising their rights.

Toshiba also said two executives, Masayasu Toyohara and Masaharu Kamo, will leave this month. The report alleged these two reached out to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) for support ahead of Toshiba's annual general meeting last July.

In the statement, Toshiba said it "will take action to identify the root cause without delay, in an objective and transparent manner, including the participation of third parties."

The board, particularly chairman Osamu Nagayama, is likely to continue to face repercussions from the report in the run-up to the annual shareholders meeting on June 25.

Earlier on Sunday, 3D Investment Partners, Toshiba's second-biggest shareholder, wrote in a letter to the chairman and the three audit committee members calling for their immediate resignations.

3D's letter, seen by Reuters, describes Nagayama as "ultimately responsible for Toshiba's recent governance failures, including the flawed internal investigation and the board's determination to oppose an outside, independent investigation."

Quiddity Advisors analyst Travis Lundy, who writes on online commentary platform Smartkarma, also questioned the responsibilities of Nagayama, who also serves as nomination committee chairman.

"The problem with a board, and most particularly an audit committee is that someone is supposed to watch the watcher. That is Nagayama-san's job," he said.

Shareholder advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services Inc has recommended that shareholders should vote against the re-appointment of Nagayama, saying that he should be held responsible for the re-appointments of audit committee members.

A Toshiba spokeswoman said such criticism should be mitigated as the two audit committee members are now leaving. Toshiba declined to make the chairman or executives Toyohara and Kamo available for comment.

Four independent directors, who on Friday called for a shake-up of Toshiba's management and board, released a statement welcoming the announced changes.

(Reporting by Makiko Yamazaki; Editing by David Dolan and Jane Merriman)

GREEN CAPITALI$M  ESG/CSR

Threatened Caribbean coral reefs get a new ally: insurance

The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, the world's second largest, will soon be covered by two insurance policies

Fish swim at a coral reef garden in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia on May 28, 2021. (REUTERS)

By Reuters
LAST UPDATED 12.06.2021 

As climate change threatens coral reefs around the world, conservation experts in Latin America have enlisted an unlikely ally to try to preserve them: the insurance industry

The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System - the world's second largest which runs from southern Mexico to Honduras - will soon be covered by two insurance policies that will pay out after hurricanes to fund repairs and debris cleaning.

A decade after experts first discussed the idea of reef insurance, Mexico's Quintana Roo state government in 2019 took out what was likely the world's first policy, covering areas near the tourist resorts of Cancun.

Also read: Unique Red Sea coral reefs are 'under threat' from an oil deal

The nonprofit MAR Fund will soon take out a second, covering sites in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras, paid for with grant money from the InsuResilience Solutions Fund, backed by the German government.

"How important is this from 0 to 10? I'd say 10," said Claudia Ruiz, Reef Rescue Initiative coordinator at MAR Fund, which works on the conservation and sustainable use of the Mesoamerican reef.

"You're not only helping the biodiversity of the reef but also the coastal communities that depend on the reef."

Pariama Hutasoit, a 52-year-old coral reef conservationist, along with volunteers, pick up corals from a nursery to be planted using Reef Star, a steel rod structure coated with sand at a coral reef garden in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia, May 28, 2021. (REUTERS)

Coral reefs are essential for protecting aquatic life and shielding coastlines from storms, but they are under threat from pollution and warmer oceans due to climate change.

That stress has led to their bleaching - in which ailing coral expel the colorful algae living on them - which increases the likelihood the coral will die.

"The reefs are in a really bad state," said Fernando Secaira, the climate risk and resilience lead for Mexico at the environmental charity The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

"We've lost 80% of the coral here in the Mexican Caribbean."

Though healthy reefs can recover from hurricanes, climate change has made that harder, scientists say. Quick payouts to help remove debris after storms and stick broken corals back together can help, reef experts say.

Fast cash

Around the world, insurers are increasingly offering policies to cover climate change-related threats, from flooding to wildfires.

The policies pay out if a pre-determined trigger is passed, such as the size of a hurricane or flood, rather than according to the actual damage, allowing for quicker delivery of needed recovery cash.

"Days and a few weeks make a big difference and so having that funding very, very quickly ...(is) really valuable," said Simon Young, senior director in the climate and resilience hub at insurance firm Willis Towers Watson, the broker working with MAR Fund. "The traditional conservation funding model does not allow for that," he added.

A school of fish swim above a staghorn coral colony as it grows on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Cairns, Australia October 25, 2019. (REUTERS)

But some environmentalists have doubts about the new approach.

Jorge Herrera, a marine biologist and coastal ecosystems specialist at CINVESTAV, a Mexican science and technology institute, said hurricanes aren't the main problem facing the region's beleaguered reefs.

He added that conservation efforts in the region focus too much on coral and not enough on mangroves, seagrasses and other less flashy but essential parts of coastal ecosystems.

"The insurance should include the whole system, not (just) the reef," Herrera said.

Those involved in the new insurance push said it was a first step and work was underway on similar insurance for mangroves, which absorb climate-changing emissions, serve as fish nurseries and protect coasts from storm surges.

Secaira, whose organization designed the training for the post-hurricane reef response brigades, said that after a storm coral fragments could be recovered and used in repairs, making it a cost-effective way of restoring the reef.

Brigades in Puerto Morelos, in Quintana Roo, repaired 15,000 coral colonies in the 40 days after Hurricanes Delta and Zeta slammed into the coast within weeks of each other in 2020, Secaira said.

Young said it was relatively simple to quantify the risks from various categories of hurricanes, making it easier to work out insurance at a good price.

"I don't think insurance at any cost is necessarily a good value proposition but at the right cost it definitely can be."

(Reporting by Christine Murray; Editing by Laurie Goering for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly)

Also read: Scientists are on a quest to save a climate ally: seagrasses

3D-Printed Human Tissue Wins Impressive NASA Challenge

WE CAN'T PRINT ORGANS JUST YET BUT THIS BREAKTHROUGH GETS US CLOSER

 

I

MAGE CREDIT: HELLORF ZCOOL/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM


By Dr Alfredo Carpineti

11 JUN 2021

We are probably many decades away from being able to build organs in the lab from scratch. A major hurdle is the fact that what we can produce doesn’t have the vascularization – blood vessels – we get in naturally grown organs. Without that, you can’t feed the cells if you make the tissue realistically thick.

To entice more research in the area, NASA put forward a $500,000 prize back in 2016 for the first three teams that could create “thick, metabolically-functional human vascularized organ tissue” in the lab. Five years later, there are two winners.

Both winners alight from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) in Winston-Salem and were competing as Team Winston and Team WFIRM. They won, respectively, first place and second place. Third place, and the final $100,000, is currently being fought over by two other teams.

The teams demonstrated that their 3D-printed human tissues are capable of perfusion – the process in an organism that brings nutrients to cells and removes metabolic waste. They designed a thick tissue through which nutrients and oxygen can flow. It used gel-like molds over which the tissue is grown. The mold is then dissolved leaving the fake blood vessels in place

.
Team Winston's printed tissue in the chamber where it can perform perfusion.

Image Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

“I cannot overstate what an impressive accomplishment this is. When NASA started this challenge in 2016, we weren’t sure there would be a winner,” Jim Reuter, NASA associate administrator for space technology, said in a statement. “It will be exceptional to hear about the first artificial organ transplant one day and think this novel NASA challenge might have played a small role in making it happen.”

Team Winston will now have the opportunity to send such an experiment to the International Space Station. There it could be used to study the effect of cosmic radiation or microgravity on human tissues, and maybe lead ways to counteract that.

"The value of an artificial tissue depends entirely on how well it mimics what happens in the body,” said Lynn Harper, challenge administrator at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. “The requirements are precise and vary from organ to organ, making the task extremely exacting and complex. The research resulting from this NASA challenge represents a benchmark, a well-documented foundation to build the next advance upon.”

Space might also be crucial to future designs into vascularized tissues. Thanks to the microgravity environment, it could be easier to 3D print human tissues in space.

SPACE RACE 2.0

NASA'S MARS ROVER SHARES NEW 2.4 BILLION-PIXEL, 360-DEGREE PANORAMIC IMAGE FROM JEZERO

Credit: NASA/JPL
Jun 12, 2021, 

Since gently dropping down onto the Red Planet's surface on Feb. 18, NASA's amazing Perseverance Mars rover has been quite busy, trundling around Jezero Crater, deploying a little drone helicopter, making microphone recordings, and capturing more than 75,000 images of the surrounding terrain.

Now NASA has released the rover's latest photographic impressions of our neighboring planet in the form of an impressive 360-degree panorama pieced together using 992 separate images snapped by its Mastcam-Z stereo imaging system.

MORE MARS

Humans could someday be living underground on Mars, which is the best SPF of all

Perseverance Mars rover obtained these photos as it sat idle out at the “Van Zyl Overlook” inside the Jezero Crater while its accompanying Ingenuity Mars helicopter finished up its initial flights between April 15 and 26.

Hold your breath and have a look around...

Stitched together into a single mosaic, these images represent 2.4 billion pixels of Mars' barren world. The rover shot in this panorama was taken on Mar. 20, 2021 and added to deliver a more accurate sense of scale and perspective.

Imaging coverage of the sky has been digitally smoothed over based on the true observed sky color. The video's accompanying audio recording was created on Feb. 22, 2021 and contributes an eerie mood while you explore the landscape.

Per NASA, Perseverance is about to kick off its new science phase this month as it exits the “Octavia E. Butler” landing site.

““We are putting the rover’s commissioning phase as well as the landing site in our rearview mirror and hitting the road. Over the next several months, Perseverance will be exploring a 1.5-square-mile patch of crater floor,” said Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement. “It is from this location that the first samples from another planet will be collected for return to Earth by a future mission

JUNE 10 2021 ECLIPSE PHOTOS

          ECLIPSE,  CALGARY ALBERTA

ECLIPSE IN RUSSIA FROM THE MOSCOW TIMES

YOU CAN SEE THE MOON REFLECTION IN THE CLOUDS TO THE LEFT

‘Eclipse Season’ Is Over. The Next One Will Bring A 97% ‘Blood Moon’ And A Total Solar Eclipse

Jamie Carter
Senior Contributor

FORBES
Science
I inspire people to go stargazing, watch the Moon, enjoy the night sky

Discover the celestial mechanics behind eclipses and why they come in seasons.

NASA'S SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO

Eclipse season is done. Thursday’s annular solar eclipse—mostly seen as a partial “bite” out of the Sun by the Moon, though to some as a “ring of fire”—was the second and final eclipse of the current season.

Wait. Eclipses come in seasons? Yes—and the next one beginning on November 19, 2021 is going to be way more spectacular than the one Earth just experienced.

Here’s everything you need to know—and the dates for your diary—of 2021’s second eclipse season, and the celestial mechanics behind these dramatic periods:
What is an ‘eclipse season’ and why do two eclipses follow each other?

Every 173 days an eclipse season begins. They last between 31 and 37 days and occur when the Moon is lined-up perfectly to intersect the ecliptic—the apparent path of the Sun through our daytime sky and the plane of Earth’s orbit of the Sun.

The Moon’s orbit of Earth is tilted by 5º to the ecliptic, so it must cross the ecliptic twice each month, but that tilt means it usually doesn’t align with the Sun and the Earth.

However, when it does align to cause a solar or lunar eclipse, it’s still precise enough a couple of weeks later to cause the other type of eclipse.

When is the next eclipse season?

2021’s second eclipse season begins with the full Moon of November 19, 2021 with a partial lunar eclipse that’s so nearly a total lunar eclipse. It will be visible in North America.

It will be followed on the next New Moon—December 4, 2021—with that most dramatic kind of eclipse of all, a total solar eclipse.



A full blood moon is seen during a partial eclipse in Taipei on May 26, 2021 as stargazers across ... [+] AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

What will the ‘Frosty Half-Blood Moon Eclipse’ look like?

November 19, 2021’s full Moon—known colloquially as the “Frosty Moon” is technically a partial lunar eclipse since the whole of the Moon won’t enter Earth’s shadow in space. But it will be so close! In fact, 97% will turn red as seen from North and South America, Australia and Asia.

Lunar eclipses can only occur at full Moon, when the Earth is between the Moon and the Sun.

Will it look at good as May’s “Super Flower Blood Moon,” which lasted for just 15 minutes? Probably not quite, but it’s going to be an awesome sight.

The diamond ring effect occurs with Baily's Beads at the end of totality during The Great American 

What will December’s total solar eclipse look like?

Occurring low in the sky above the floating icebergs of the Wedell Sea on December 4, 2021, this total solar eclipse in Antarctica won’t be witnessed by many, though over 20 cruise ships are planning to be in the area.

Solar eclipses can only occur at New Moon, when the Moon is between the Earth and the Sun.

They’ll feel the Moon’s shadow rush towards them and the temperature drop while the light plunges to twilight. With naked eyes in clear skies they’ll see the last ray of sunlight form a beautiful “diamond ring” around the Moon before the big reveal of the Sun’s delicate ice-white corona spraying into space.

Disclaimed: I am the editor of WhenIsTheNextEclipse.com

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.


Jamie Carter
I'm an experienced science, technology and travel journalist and stargazer writing about exploring the night sky, solar and lunar eclipses, moon-gazing, astro-travel, astronomy and space exploration. I'm the editor of WhenIsTheNextEclipse.com and the author of "A Stargazing Program for Beginners: A Pocket Field Guide" (Springer, 2015), as well as many eclipse-chasing guides.