Question: How does a procrastinating, crowd-averse father get his family from Edwards, CO into the path of totality for the 2017 total eclipse? Via Denver and I24? Heaven forbid! Back roads to Casper? No rooms or campsites for 50 miles in any direction. Answer: By schlepping northward to Shoshone, WY and pitching camp in the ersatz “Bill’s RV Park”. A mere sheep pasture until two days earlier, it was now a sheep pasture…with a PortaPotty.For our efforts we were rewarded with down-home hospitality and front row seating for one of nature’s most stunning spectacles: a total eclipse of the Sun.Now, you may think the Moon is quite ordinary. From an astronomical standpoint, nothing could be further from the truth. For starters, our Moon is 50 times larger than any other moon in the solar system, compared to its host planet.Even to have a perfect eclipse is quite remarkable  As luck would have it, the Sun is both 400 times larger in diameter than the Moon and 400 times farther, so that the Moon can perfectly occlude the Sun while allowing us to see and study its corona. Because the Moon is slowly pulling away from Earth, in about half a billion years there will be no more total eclipses. This may seem like a long time – it is, actually – but in geological terms we’re 90% there.    Until quite recently the origin of the Moon was a complete mystery. The prevailing theories during my youth – capture of a floating celestial…