03/10/2026
In the pre-dawn hours of March 3, 2026, the sky above San Diego County’s Palomar Mountain region put on a rare celestial performance: the last total lunar eclipse visible from North America until New Year’s Eve 2028. At San Diego State University’s (SDSU) Sky Oaks Ranch Ecological Reserve — a dark-sky site nestled in the Cleveland National Forest far from city lights — a network of scientific cameras documented every phase of the eclipse from dusk to dawn. The resulting time-lapse record vividly illustrates what happens to a moonlit landscape when the Moon is swallowed by Earth’s shadow — and what is revealed when that shadow falls.
The NSF-funded HPWREN is a non-commercial, prototype, high-performance, wide-area, wireless network in San Diego that includes backbone nodes at UCSD and several remote areas.
