Solar Eclipse Caught on Camera by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

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Katherine Tanner
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On the 21st August this year, a solar eclipse occurred. During that eclipse, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured this phenomenon as part of an image of the Moon’s shadow casting over a significant portion of the United States. The LRO managed to capture the image very near to where totality lasted the longest using the spacecraft’s Narrow-Angle Camera.


This animation begins with the black-and-white image of the Moon’s shadow on Earth, as seen by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO. The levels of gray in the image are gradually adjusted, saturating the background until the features of the landscape disappear. At that point, it’s possible to see the edge of the total solar eclipse. As the gray levels are restored, the umbra, or the completely shadowed area, becomes visible, followed by the penumbra, or partial shadow where part of the Sun peeks over the edge of the Moon.LRO’s Narrow-Angle Camera can record 3600 gray levels, whereas most digital cameras record only 255 levels of gray. The camera was designed this way because the Moon is a high-contrast target, with very bright materials next to dark materials. In these images, those 3,600 levels of gray were squeezed into 255 levels because that’s what a typical computer screen is capable of displaying. Credits: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

The Narrow-Angle Camera works by building up an image line by line opposed to more instant framing that you get with the smartphone or digital cameras. It’s part of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera System which includes two Narrow-Angle Cameras in which to capture high-resolution black and white images and a Wide Angle Camera that captures images using filters to get information regarding the properties and color of the lunar surface.


Down here on Earth, the sight of an eclipse is a pretty exciting event, but for the moon, it’s an everyday occurrence. Luckily solar eclipses don’t affect power supply of the spacecraft so LRO was able to carry on with its mission without any concern. Since its initial launch in 2009, LRO has gathered a collection of data, and as a result, has made a great contribution to what we know about the Moon and to also show us just how beautiful the Earth is through these eclipse images.

LRO is a project under NASA’s Discovery Program and is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.


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