We simply acquired some nice birds-eye views of this previous weekend’s whole lunar eclipse, due to astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The eclipse occurred in a single day from Sunday to Monday (Sept. 7 to Sept. 8). It was seen from a lot of the Eastern Hemisphere, thrilling numerous folks throughout western Australia, Asia, Africa and Europe.
It was additionally seen from 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth — the common altitude of the ISS — and the parents up there did not have to fret about clouds blocking their views.
But they did face different points, as NASA’s Zena Cardman defined.
“It’s a problem to catch the moon up here — we don’t have any up-facing windows, so we can only see the moon for a few minutes between moonrise and moonset before it disappears above the ISS or below the horizon,” she wrote in an X post on Monday.
“Yesterday was an extra challenge, dealing with low-angle light bouncing through the multi-paned cupola glass,” she added.
But Cardman was profitable in capturing the eclipse, as had been her ISS colleagues Jonny Kim of NASA and Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). All three shared images of the eclipse on X on Monday.
“We solely had brief home windows of time to catch a glimpse of the moon earlier than it was obstructed by components of the @Space_Station,” Kim wrote in his submit, which featured 4 eclipse photographs.
One of Yui’s images demonstrated the “blood moon” impact of a complete lunar eclipse, displaying Earth’s nearest neighbor exhibiting a coppery glow.
This outcomes as a result of Earth’s environment absorbs comparatively brief wavelengths of sunshine, letting solely the longer-wavelength reddish hues by way of to color the lunar floor.
Yui and Cardman, together with NASA’s Mike Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, arrived on the ISS on Aug. 2 on SpaceX’s Crew-11 mission. Kim, and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky, went up in April on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.