A Spacecraft Just Recorded The Lunar Eclipse Like You've Never Witnessed It Before

There is a total lunar eclipse. As Earth passes between the Moon and the Sun, its shadow slips across the face of our satellite so only long, red wavelength sunlight can slip through.

That is when we see it on our planet. Thanks to the asteroid probe Lucy, launched in October 2021, we can see what the view is like from space.

Lucy was at a distance of around 100 million kilometers from Earth at the time of the recent total lunar eclipse.

While total lunar eclipses aren't that rare, they happen every year or so, and it isn't that often that you get a chance to observe them from an entirely new angle.

When the team realized Lucy had a chance to observe the lunar eclipse as part of the instrument calibration process, everyone was excited.

During the course of about three hours, the spacecraft took 86 1-millisecond exposures using its high-resolution, black-and-white L'LORRI instrument, which was sent back home to Earth to be stitched together into a timelapse of the first half of the eclipse.

In the video, Earth and its satellite can be seen in the distance, separated from each other by a distance of 224,000 miles, both lit by the Sun. Scientists made the Moon visible because it is much fainter than the Sun. The Moon winks out as the video progresses.

It is a great demonstration of the mechanics of a total lunar eclipse, as well as the capabilities of the L'LORRI camera, which will take images of the asteroids at a much greater distance from the Sun.

Because the instrument is designed to operate in a colder thermal environment, the work to obtain the timelapse had to be very carefully conducted.

planetary scientist John Spencer said that capturing these images was an amazing team effort.

The instrument, guidance, navigation and science operations teams all had to work together to collect the data.

The results can also be used for other purposes. During one of the most spectacular displays the Moon gives us, they give us a different view of our home world and satellite. It is breathtaking.