People across the US were stunned by the lunar eclipse last night — but for one observer on the moon, it wasn’t a lunar eclipse but rather a solar one. The Blue Ghost spacecraft from Firefly Aerospace, currently at home in the moon’s Mars Crisium basin, got the opposite view from us here on the planet as the Earth appeared to pass in front of the sun.
Eclipses happen when the moon, the Earth, and the sun are in a straight line so that we see the Earth’s shadow appearing to turn the moon red, while on the moon the Earth appears to block out the sun. Luckily Blue Ghost was able to capture a gorgeous image of the eclipse, seen above, at around 4:30 a.m. ET.
“The photo shows the sun about to emerge from totality behind Earth,” Firefly wrote in an update. “This marks the first time in history a commercial company was actively operating on the Moon and able to observe a total solar eclipse where the Earth blocks the sun and casts a shadow on the lunar surface. This phenomenon occurred simultaneously as the lunar eclipse we witnessed on Earth.”
The lander also captured a super cool video of the eclipse, stitched together from a series of photos with different exposures to allow for the different amount of light present over time. The moon’s surface appears to be red because of the way sunlight passes through Earth’s atmosphere, making for a spooky lunar environment. If you look closely you’ll see it appears as if there are two versions of the solar eclipse, as the bottom one is a reflection of the eclipse in the lander’s solar panel.
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Other images have been coming in from Blue Ghost this week too, including this stunning view of the sun just as the solar eclipse began, taken at around 1:30 a.m. ET:
And the lander has also captured our own planet as well as the sun, like this image of Earth as seen from the moon:
Blue Ghost will continue its operations on the moon including capturing a lunar sunset before the end of the mission on March 16.