The ‘ring of fire’ solar eclipse was visible from India on June 21. People shared breathtaking pictures of the phenomenon that they took from their balconies. And if the eclipse looked so magnificent from earth imagine what it must’ve looked like from space.
A NASA astronaut living and working in space and a number of weather satellites caught the event as the moon’s shadow passed over earth’s surface.
‘Super cool view of the Annular Solar Eclipse which passed by our starboard side as we flew over China this morning,’ NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy wrote on Twitter while sharing the pictures.
According to Space.com, ‘a ‘ring of fire’ or annular eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the sun and earth. But, unlike during a total solar eclipse, the moon isn’t close enough to earth to block the sun’s ‘visible disk.’ From the space, astronauts and satellites saw the round shadow of the moon over earth’s surface.
That is what Cassidy saw from the International Space Station. At the time, the space station was reportedly passing about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.
Other satellites captured the solar eclipse from a much higher altitude. Russia’s Elektro-L No.2 weather satellite spotted an interplay of shadows.
