After recently landing at the Moon’s Mare Crisium, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander craft was treated to a spectacle that’s rarely observed: a total solar eclipse as seen from the surface of the Moon. This entire experience was detailed on the Blue Ghost Mission 1 live blog. As the company notes, this is the first time that a commercial entity has been able to observe this phenomenon.
During this event, the Earth gradually moved in front of the Sun, as observed from the lunar surface. During this time, the Blue Ghost lander had to rely on its batteries as it was capturing the solar eclipse with a wide-angle camera on its top deck.
Unlike the Blood Moon seen from the Earth, there was no such cool effect observed from the Lunar surface. The Sun simply vanished, leaving a narrow ring of light around the Earth. The reason for the Blood Moon becomes obvious, however, as the refracting of the sunlight through Earth’s atmosphere changes the normal white-ish light to shift to an ominous red.
The entire sequence of images captured can be observed in the video embedded on the live blog and below, giving a truly unique view of something that few humans (and robots) have so far been able to observe.
You can make your own lunar eclipse. Or, make your own solar eclipse, at least once a day.
Like seeing the sunset and sunrise from every point on the terminator simultaneously
Ah, there’s nothing like lying on your back watching a solar eclipse.
Blue Ghost is upright and functioning as planned. You’re thinking of IM-2.
Actually, this is from Blue Ghost, the lander that succeeded. You’re thinking of Intuitive Machine’s Athena lander, that landed on its side, and quickly ran out of battery power. It was in the news, btw…
I wonder what would happen if a 500 kt nuclear weapon was detonated on the moon. If there’s plenty of Helium-3 perhaps it could sustain a nuclear reaction?
No, absolutely zero chance. It’s “plentiful” in the sense that you could refine it out of tons and tons of regolith
If a 500kt nuclear weapon was detonated on the moon, you would get a 500 kt nuclear explosion and make a pretty large crater. No sustainable chain reaction beyond your bomb would occur and you will not be have nearly enough temperature or pressure for fusion. You wll however, make a mess.
Billions of tax money spent on this image..
And…that’s supposed to be a bad thing?
Firefly’s blue ghost is a bit more cost efficient than the past ventures to the moon. 1 launch of the Saturn v costed roughly the GDP of the USA at the time.
Where on earth did you get that nonsense, and how can you possibly consider it plausible?
In truth it’s barely a rounding error.
The entire Apollo program spanning those 13 years cost ~$26B. Call it $200M/yr.
The US GDP in 1970 was $1Trillion.
Apollo cost two tenths of one percent the GDP. Or about one weekday morning’s worth of work per year.
As a fraction of GDP, one Saturn V rocket cost about a the same as a coffee break.
In the words of Mark Twain, “If you argue with a fool, the onlookers will hardly know the difference.”
Exactly. How many Apollo programs have we spent on recent proxy wars?
about 0.2 billion, to be precise
for a comparison, the US gov spends $38 billion per year just on paper forms
That would include the forms required to fulfill the requirements of the Paperwork Reduction Act, of course.
actually it’s up to 101 million for 10 payloads.
nice try, Elon.
I think it would still be termed an annular solar eclipse. The thing getting covered up is in the… ouch name because viewing this from the moon is a relatively recent phenomenon. But there should be a much cooler name!! Terra-solar eclipse or something
I’ve commented on this on the original YouTube video, but haven’t gotten much in the way of a sensible answer. Maybe this is a better forum.
First we have the apparent sizes of the Sun and Moon as seen from Earth. These are approximately equal because it’s a similar triangle problem where the radius of the Sun divided by its distance from Earth is approximately equal to the radius of the Moon divided by its distance from Earth. This is why we can see either total or annular solar eclipses, depending on the relative distances of the Sun and Moon at different points in Earth’s orbit.
Now: to see an annular solar eclipse from the Moon, the apparent sizes of the Sun and Earth have to be approximately equal. Again, it’s a similar triangles problem, with three known facts:
1) Distance of Earth from the Moon is exactly the same as the distance of the Moon from Earth.
2) Distances of the Sun to either the Earth or the Moon differ by less than 1%, because the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, while the distance Sun to Moon is the same distance plus only about 0.25 million miles.
3) The radius of Earth is much, MUCH greater than the radius of the Moon.
The only conclusion I can make from these facts is that the apparent size of Earth from the moon is much greater than the apparent size of the Sun.
Somebody please tell me how we see an annular solar eclipse (with the Earth doing the occluding) if the Earth appears much larger than the Sun. I.e., how could that picture, if it is what they say it is, have been taken from the Moon?
Somebody on YouTube DID eventually explain this. When you are looking at Earth from a significant distance, and the Sun is completely blocked by Earth, one edge is in dawn, while the opposite edge is in dusk. So you CAN see a whole halo of dawn/dusk at the same time. It will be much brighter on the side the Sun is closest to, which is exactly what we see in the pictures.
By the way, from the Moon, the Sun is about a 1/2 degree disc, while the Earth is almost a 2 degree disc.