NASA scientists aboard the STEREO-B spacecraft were simply calibrating their cameras when they caught this lunar transit of the sun. "The fantastically-colored star is our own sun as STEREO sees it in four wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light. The black disk is the Moon," NASA reports. Why does the moon seem so small? STEREO-B, which is on a mission to study the sun, circles it "in an Earth-like orbit, but it lags behind Earth by one million miles. This means STEREO-B is 4.4 times further from the Moon than we are, and so the Moon looks 4.4 times smaller."
NASA scientists aboard the STEREO-B spacecraft were simply calibrating their cameras when they caught this lunar transit of the sun. "The fantastically-colored star is our own sun as STEREO sees it in four wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light. The black disk is the Moon," NASA reports. Why does the moon seem so small? STEREO-B, which is on a mission to study the sun, circles it "in an Earth-like orbit, but it lags behind Earth by one million miles. This means STEREO-B is 4.4 times further from the Moon than we are, and so the Moon looks 4.4 times smaller."
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