Of course tons of photos and videos of the total solar eclipse on Monday are flooding the ‘net, and I’ve seen some amazing ones. Still, I have a place in my heart for images taken from space, and seeing an eclipse from this vantage is just amazing.

The following animation was taken using images from NASA’s Earth-observing DSCOVR satellite, which is in a parking orbit 1.6 million kilometers closer to the Sun (called the L1 point). It faces our home world and takes images of the fully illuminated hemisphere. You can usually see the planet’s rotation and clouds moving, but on Monday of course it had a substantially cooler view😀 

WHOA.

Shadows cast by the Moon: a dark one, called the umbra, which is 150 or so km wide, centered inside a much wider penumbra, or lighter shadow. In the umbra you see the Moon completely blocking the Sun — a total eclipse — but in the penumbra only part of the Sun is blocked (which is why the shadow isn’t as dark). It’s hard to tell the difference between them on this scale, but what you’re seeing here is mostly the penumbra.

The shadow moves west to east (the Moon orbits Earth at about 1 km per second, much faster than our planet rotates) and you can see its motion relative to the surface. The astronauts on board the International Space Station saw the eclipse, too. I hope we’ll get some nice hi-res photos from that soon. I searched but didn’t find them yet.

I hope a lot of you saw this wonderful event for yourselves, or can see some of the many coming up in interesting places, too.

Heads up! Today (April 11) at 18:30 UTC (2:30 p.m. Eastern US time) a small asteroid will give us a very close shave indeed, passing just a little over 12,000 km above Earth’s surface!

That’s close. The good news is a) the rock is less than 5 meters across, and 2) will definitely miss. The uncertainty in the distance is about 100 km.

Actually the “missing us” part isn’t all that great of good news. An asteroid that size won’t do any damage, and would put on a helluva show. It would explode high off the surface, and rain down small meteorites (which, to be honest, can do some damage if they hit things like houses or people), but that’s about it.

Become a paying subscriber of Premium Membership to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.

Already a paying subscriber? Sign In