Image:NASA-solar eclipse STEREO-B.ogg

NASA describes this video with these words: "No human has ever witnessed a solar eclipse quite like the one captured on this video. The NASA STEREO-B spacecraft, managed by the Goddard Space Center, was about a million miles from Earth , February 25, 2007, when it photographed the Moon passing in front of the sun. The resulting movie looks like it came from an alien solar system. The fantastically-colored star is our own sun as STEREO sees it in four wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light. The black disk is the Moon. When we observe a lunar transit from Earth, the Moon appears to be the same size as the sun, a coincidence that produces intoxicatingly beautiful solar eclipses. The silhouette STEREO-B saw, on the other hand, was only a fraction of the Sun. The Moon seems small because of the STEREO-B location. The spacecraft circles the sun in an Earth-like orbit, but it lags behind Earth by one million miles. This means STEREO-B is 4.4 times further from the Moon than we are, and so the Moon looks 4.4 times smaller. This version of the STEREO-B eclipse movie is a composite of data from the coronagraph and extreme ultraviolet imager of the spacecraft. STEREO-B has a sister ship named STEREO-A. Both are on a mission to study the sun. While STEREO-B lags behind Earth, STEREO-A orbits one million miles ahead ("B" for behind, "A" for ahead). The gap is deliberate as it allows the two spacecraft to capture offset views of the sun. Researchers can then combine the images to produce 3D stereo movies of solar storms. The two spacecraft were launched in Oct. 2006 and reached their stations on either side of Earth in January 2007. ID: MSFC-0700861

NASA (NIX)

02.25.2007

NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC)

NASA not noted as copyrighted, thus public domain.