Here it is: The first clear image of an eclipse of the Sun by the Earth, taken from the surface of the Moon.
This is what last night's lunar eclipse looked like from the Blue Ghost lander's perspective on the Moon. Amazing!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/54386246629/in/dateposted/ #space #science #art #tech
I mean, it's a great coincidence to begin with that the moon and the sun have the same apparent sizes when seen from the earth in solar eclipses
but the earth is significantly bigger than the moon, and the moon is as far away from the earth as the earth is from the moon, so the apparent size of the earth as seen from the moon should be bigger than that of the moon as seen from the earth
but the earth seems slightly smaller than the sun in the picture, and it's not like the moon is closer to the sun than the earth is to justify this discrepancy by seeing an apparently bigger sun
ISTM that it's too much of a coincidence that the apparent size of the earth would be as close to that of the sun as seen from the moon, on top of the coincidence that the apparent sizes of the moon and of the sun are about the same when seen from the earth.
it's not absolutely impossible, but the moon orbit would have to be just weird enough to make for this coincidence just at the time of the eclipse that I'm having trouble believing that.
can anyone offer evidence that the compounded coincidence is indeed plausible, and that the picture isn't a fake? I could more easily believe it's a picture of an earlier solar eclipse seen from the earth, or some AIrstistic rendering of a solar eclipse as seen from the moon misgeneralized from pictures of solar eclipses taken from the earth
cc: @steve@mastodon.cooleysekula.net @JorgeStolfi@mas.to @faconti@mastodon.social
It's from the official Firefly Aerospace Flickr account, which otherwise mostly shows pictures of stuff they send to space. I suppose it's possible they decided to add fake pictures of the eclipse, but that seems like a weird approach for a not particularly self-promotional company to do. Surely if they were in it for the clicks they would be doing this on Instagram, which is full of fakes, not on Flickr, which hardly anyone uses except actual photographers.