While we watch the 'Blood moon' lunar eclipse tonight, the Firefly Blue Ghost lander will capture a solar eclipse on the moon!
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While we watch the 'Blood moon' lunar eclipse tonight, the Firefly Blue Ghost lander will capture a solar eclipse on the moon!
The eclipse at Firefly’s landing site will last ~5 hours starting at 0500 UTC and will include ~2 hours of totality, starting at 0618 UTC.
Here is a visualization from NASA of the view from the Moon, as Earth's disk covers a much smaller Sun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YORyBZ7qJ8
https://fireflyspace.com/news/blue-ghost-mission-1-live-updates/
Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio
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The visualization above from NASA is for the lunar eclipse of Sept 28, 2015 UTC.
"When viewed from the Moon, the Earth hides the Sun. A red ring, the sum of all Earth’s sunrises and sunsets, lines the Earth’s limb and casts a ruddy light on the lunar landscape. With the darkness of the eclipse, the stars come out.
The city lights of North and South America and of western Europe and Africa are visible on the night side of the Earth."
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This is what the solar eclipse might look like to the Blue Ghost lander from the moon's surface, except that Blue Ghost will be using a much wider angle camera and (as @cosmos4u points out) earth will be smaller relative to the Sun.
This photograph of an eclipse of the Sun was taken with a 16mm motion picture camera from the Apollo 12 spacecraft during its trans-Earth journey home from the Moon in November 1969.
Beautiful!
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/eclipse-apollo-12/
Credit: NASA
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Here is a dramatic video of a solar eclipse taken by the JAXA/NHK KAGUYA (SELENE) lunar orbiter on February 10, 2009 (Japan Standard Time).
Let's wait and see how the images taken by the Firefly Blue Ghost lander tonight will compare with this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L36OsnEinI4
https://global.jaxa.jp/press/2009/02/20090218_kaguya_e.html
@astrodad
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Here is a visualization from NASA of tonight's lunar eclipse with time information for various phases of the eclipse.
Happy viewing and photographing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHGWLSxTPl4
Photography tips - https://www.space.com/how-to-photograph-a-lunar-eclipse
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Bravo! Here is a first look at the solar eclipse by the Firefly Blue Ghost lander around 12:30 am CDT.
Notice the glowing ring of light in the reflection of the solar panel as Earth began to block the sun.
"We hope to downlink more imagery soon once our X-band antenna warms up from the cold temperatures faced in the darkness of totality."
https://fireflyspace.com/news/blue-ghost-mission-1-live-updates/
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G gustavinobevilacqua@mastodon.cisti.org shared this topic
