Earthrise Image (with Eclipse) from Doomed Spacecraft

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https://www.fraknoi.com/astronomy/eclipsed-earth-rise-from-the-moon/

Source:   Andrew Fraknoi blog

Excerpt: On April 20, the Japanese Hakuto-R spacecraft took a remarkable image of the Earth from orbit around the Moon, showing a total eclipse of the Sun in progress near Australia. Unfortunately, the spacecraft, which would have been the first commercial mission to land on the Moon, appears to have crashed on the Moon when the controllers attempted touch down on April 25. Still, this beautiful image, showing our colorful Earth on the limb of the Moon will stand as a testament to the mission. (They are not the first to fail to land a capsule on the Moon, and they probably won’t be the last.)

Click the little arrow on the side of the photo and you will be taken to a closer-up image of the Earth that shows more clearly the dark shadow of the Moon during the April 20th eclipse. That view is from DSCOVR, a climate-monitoring satellite (belonging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,) about a million miles away. In an eclipse of the Sun, the Moon gets between the Earth and the Sun, and covers some or all of the Sun, producing a dark shadow on our planet.

These eclipse images are a good reminder that we are about 6 months away from an annular eclipse of the Sun (Oct. 14, 2023) and about a year away from a total eclipse of the Sun (Apr. 8, 2024), both of which will be visible from North America (including the U.S.) You can learn more about these upcoming eclipses in a booklet that a colleague and I wrote for teachers, free at: http://bit.ly/eclipsesforteachers



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