There was no eclipse on Earth, today, but there was one in Earth orbit. More than 22,000 miles above the planet's surface, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory watched the Moon pass almost directly in front of the sun:

Image
© NASA/SDO
Look at the full-sized image and trace your finger around the Moon's limb. Thanks to the high resolution of SDO's 16 megapixel cameras, you can actually count jagged mountains backlit by the sun's atmosphere.

Beyond the novelty of observing a such an event from space, these images have practical value to the SDO science team. Karel Schrijver of Lockheed-Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Lab explains: "The very sharp edge of the lunar limb allows us to measure the in-orbit characteristics of the telescope--e.g., light diffraction on optics and filter support grids. Once these are characterized, we can use that information to correct our data for instrumental effects and sharpen up the images to even more detail."

Movie formats: 0.4 MB iPad; 0.8 MB mpeg; 0.1 MB iPhone;