Moon Upstages the Erupting Sun (PHOTOS)

By: Laura Dattaro, 01/31/2014

A solar flare erupted from the sun yesterday morning just as the moon passed between the sun and a NASA satellite, resulting in some amazing pictures and video of an eclipse only visible from space. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has been orbiting the Earth and keeping eyes on the sun since its launch in February 2010. Yesterday morning starting at 8:31 a.m. Eastern, the moon passed between the Earth and SDO for about an hour and a half, the longest such transit ever recorded, providing ample time for SDO to snap pictures of the black circle of the moon eclipsing the fiery sun. These transits occur two to three times each year, according to NASA.

In the photos, the moon appears nearly as large as the sun, due to the moon being so much closer to SDO than our star, which is nearly 93 million miles away from Earth. (The farthest the moon ever gets from Earth is about 400,000 miles.) The moon’s edge is so sharp in the photos because it has no atmosphere to distort the sun’s light.

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