The Moon transits the Earth as seen by EPOXI

This animation, created by Don Lindler for the EPOXI team, shows the Moon passing directly in front of the Earth, a view impossible to see from the Earth itself.

More info: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/bad...

EPOXI site: http://epoxi.umd.edu/

Higher-res version: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsyste...
Credit: Don Lindler/NASA/EPOXI Team

• Category

  Science & Technology

[ORACLE063]

What a beautiful jewel we live on.

[Photomixers]

Watching the Earth rotate by 3.75 degrees per frame, once every 15 minutes for 24 hours would have been very dull, so we speeded it up to 6 frames per second, for your viewing convenience.

[DreamFlightPro]

Use to be a Beautiful Jewel

[oriontrail]

SO TRUE!

But also it's full of morons who are not interested in making this jewel a peaceful place for everyone!

[Benzino Coleone]

wow this is old.we got beautiful hd pics of earth now.

[Markos G]

Está la mitad de la Tierra iluminada y la Luna en cambio apenas se le ve nada iluminada?? no lo comprendo

[askjiir]

The moon is made of very dark material. Look how dark it is compared to earth, even though they are both exposed to the same sunlight.

[Kindahuge]

@trewryan The earth rotates at ~1000mph, so the hours passing versus the speed you're seeing on video is accurate. The moon is in fact moving at a different speed than the earth, though it's hard to eyeball if you don't already know it mathematically. Think about the fact that you can see the moon a few hours before dark up until a little bit after sunrise sometimes. Their speeds in different parts of the world appear to "overlap" and so it will be visible for longer periods.

[Kindahuge]

You're saying that someone who gave this video a thumbs down, for a reason that may be as simple as not finding astronomical occurrences interesting or "cool," disagrees with reality? I believe they're saying you're insulting people for not finding the phenomenon as interesting as you do. Haven't seen them call it fake.

[Kindahuge]

Nah, this isn't a satellite man. This is a view from a spacecraft that had previously ejected an impact probe vessel onto a comet, to test the materials below the surface. So you're seeing something that essentially is (relatively) slowly getting further away from the earth. In the very short duration of time that this video shows, you'd never notice that the earth's getting farther away. So its angle to the earth remains a straight line, no orbit : )