June 22, 2013

Combined image of the Sun and the Moon (Image NASA/SDO/LRO/GSFC)

Two or three times every year, the NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft observes the Moon passing in front of the Sun and in that case it becomes a black disk. This happened for example on October 7, 2010. No big deal, at least until Scott Wiessinger, who works with images of that probe, and Ernie Wright, who works with the images of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) space probe, combined with extreme precision the right images of the two probes to create an image of an eclipse never seen before.