Solar Eclipse from Space

Here is the view of the recent Solar Eclipse from the Japanese solar observing satellite Hinode. Notice the size difference between the Sun and the Moon. The Sun is roughly 400x bigger than the Moon and 400x farther away, so they look about the same size in the sky. But the Moon orbits the Earth in an ellipse, and can change its distance to us by about 10% — that means its apparent diameter as seen on Earth can change by about 10%. When this eclipse happened, the moon was farther away from us in its orbit and therefore its angular size is smaller than the sun resulting in an annular eclipse rather than a total eclipse.

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