Did you see the lunar eclipse last week? I wasn’t planning on it since the event was so late where I live, but I happened to wake up in the middle of the night and noticed the room was dark; when there’s a full Moon our window shade doesn’t block all of it so you can see the window outline. I realized the eclipse was happening so I went out to see it.

I took a bunch of photos, but most of them didn’t turn out well; the Moon was so dark the phone camera had a hard time focusing. I saw some really nice photos online though. 

But one… oh my, one of them is better than the rest. By a long shot. Say, a 400,000 km shot.

THIS is a photo of the lunar eclipse taken from the Moon!

Ho. Ly. WOW.

That was taken by Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost mission, which successfully landed on the Moon’s surface on March 2. Packed with instruments, it is testing the environment and doing all kinds of interesting science. It also has cameras that took amazing images of the lander’s descent as well as shots of the lunar horizon with the Earth hovering over it; the mission landed in Mare Crisium, near the Moon’s edge as seen from Earth, so Earth is always near the horizon from that location.

As it happens, Blue Ghost landed just 12 days before the total lunar eclipse, when the Moon slid into Earth’s shadow in space. From Earth, we saw the Moon grown dark as it moves through the shadow.

From the Moon, though, you would have seen the Earth moving across the face of the Sun. Earth appears about four times bigger than the Sun, so it completely blocks our nearest star. 

So, to be pedantic, it was a lunar eclipse for us on Earth. From the Moon, it was a total solar eclipse.

What’s that ring of light, then? Earth’s atmosphere. It surrounds our planet from the surface up to over a hundred kilometers. Near the beginning and end of totality, we see the sunlight shining more or less directly through the air on one side, creating that bright “diamond ring” effect at the 4:00 position. But the air acts like a lens, bending sunlight “inward”, toward the center of Earth’s disk, which means some of it is bent toward the Moon, so the air appears lit up.

Some of it appears blue, but a lot of it is reddish (there may be a filtering effect going on here, depending on the camera configuration). If you saw the eclipse, or any lunar eclipse really, you know that during totality the Moon appears dark reddish, so much so it’s sometimes called the Blood Moon. This is for the same reason sunsets appear red; bluer light is absorbed or scattered by Earth’s atmosphere (which is why the sky is blue), and when the Sun is on the horizon that light is passing through more air than it does when it’s overhead (looking straight up you’re looking through a hundred of so kilometers of air; near the horizon it’s ten times that amount). The green and even yellow light doesn’t get through, so the Sun appears orange or red. That red light is what illuminates the Moon, so it looks red at totality.

But there’s more. A total lunar eclipse can only happen at full Moon, since the Moon has to be opposite the Sun in Earth’s sky to fall into Earth’s shadow. That means it’s full, and we look down on the illuminated half of the Moon.

But from the Moon, you’d see the Earth blocking the Sun, so you’re looking at the unilluminated half of Earth, the night side. Right in the middle of Earth’s disk is local midnight, but all along one edge it’s sunrise, and all along the other it’s sunset. Anyone living on the Earth’s edge as seen from the Moon in this shot would be experiencing dawn or dusk.

And this is why this image is so magical.

You’re seeing all the sunsets and sunrises on Earth at the same time.

See? Magic.

Well, science. But science is magical, too, when it delights our senses and invokes a sense of awe and beauty in our brains.

Not-so-incidentally, I describe this exact situation in detail in my book Under Alien Skies, as if you are tourist on the Moon watching an eclipse. I did my best to make the reader feel as if they are there, experiencing this event as it unfolds. And that’s just Chapter 1. I also include encounters with Mars, asteroids, comets, Saturn, even a black hole.

Astronomy and space aren’t just something you can read about. They’re real, and you can experience them. I’m grateful to Firefly Aerospace for allowing me to use this image, but also for showing me in reality something that had previously only been in my imagination.

Tip o’ the dew shield to Michael Sheetz for helping me get permission from Firefly to use this image!

As you likely already know, I am something of a scifi dork. I love going to conventions, but when the pandemic hit I stopped going. I really miss hitting up San Diego Comic Con, and I’ve been looking to attend something more local for a while.

So I’m really happy to announce I’ll be at the Richmond, Virginia GalaxyCon, which runs from Thursday March 27 to Sunday, March 30! This is pretty local for me, and it turns out it’s a big con, with something like 40 – 50,000 people attending. Check out the guest list! They’ve got a lot of great people coming (holy crap JOHN CARPENTER, who made two of my favorite movies of all time). Here’s my page specifically.

I’ll be doing a few panels and book signings at the on-site bookstore. Here’s my schedule:

Thursday, March 27:

3:30: Panel on my book Under Alien Skies, room E22.
4:45: Book signing at Starbinder booth A13

Friday, March 28:

4:00: Panel on my book Death from the Skies! with host Joe Wos, room E22
5:15: book signing at Starbinder booth A13 

Saturday, March 29:

5:15: Science of Science Fiction panel with Delilah S Dawson, hosted by Chris Irving, room E22
6:30 Book signing with Delilah at the Starbinder booth A13

 I hope to see y’all there!

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!