(ORDO NEWS) — The Lucy spacecraft captured a video of a solar lunar eclipse. The video was posted on the YouTube channel of the Southwestern Research Institute.
During a total lunar eclipse, the Earth comes between the Sun and the Moon, blocking out the light. In this case, the Moon can acquire red hues due to light that has passed through the atmosphere.
Now Lucy has captured what a lunar eclipse looks like when viewed from outside the Earth-Moon system. It could be observed in the Western Hemisphere on May 16, while Lucy was at a distance of 100 million kilometers from Earth.
“While total lunar eclipses are not that rare they happen every year or so it’s not often that you get the opportunity to view them from a whole new angle,” said planetary scientist Hal Levison.
Over the course of about three hours, the spacecraft took 86 one-millisecond exposures using L’LORRI’s high-resolution black and white camera. Then these pictures were combined into one video to show the dynamics.
Mission Lucy launched in September 2021. It plans to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids up close to find out where the giant planets were before migrating billions of years ago.
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