March 13, 2007
Things look different when you're a million miles from home
This is how a lunar eclipse looks from more than a million miles from the Earth. The picture was taken by a NASA satellite.
"It's like being in the wrong solar system," gasped one NASA scientist after she gazed at the images.
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"What an extraordinary view ... we caught a lunar transit of the Sun," said the NASA scientist, Dr Lika Guhathakurta.
"The images have an alien quality. It's not just the strange colours of the Sun. Look at the size of the Moon; it's very odd."
By pure coincidence the relatively tiny Moon, when seen from Earth, looks exactly the same size as the much bigger and far more distant Sun.
So, during a solar eclipse our only natural satellite can block out the solar disc, bringing darkness in the middle of the day.
But [NASA satellite] STEREO-B is about 1.6 million kilometres from Earth, so to it the Moon looks 4.4 times smaller than it does to us.
The Sun looks different because the spacecraft took the pictures using four different extreme ultraviolet light wavelengths.
If you didn't know it was from our solar system, it'd be easy to believe it was an image from a sci-fi flick.
Posted by Mike Lief at March 13, 2007 11:08 AM
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