#thefirststarr

A lunar eclipse…from both sides!!

On March 13-14, 2025, the Earth passed directly between the Sun and the Moon. Earth cast its shadow, turning the Moon's typically gray and cratered surface red, aka a "Blood Moon."

While NASA’s Glenn Research Center was looking up to see the Blood Moon Eclipse last night, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander was looking back at us!

Perspective is everything….

Image Credit & Copyright:

- image 1: Credit: NASA/Sara Lowthian-Hanna

During the lunar fly on April 6, the Sun, the Moon, and the Orion spacecraft aligned, creating a solar eclipse from the perspective of the Artemis Il astronauts.

From the crew's perspective, the Moon appears large enough to completely block the Sun, creating nearly 54 minutes of totality and extending the view far beyond what is possible from Earth. The corona forms a glowing halo around the dark lunar disk, revealing details of the Sun's outer atmosphere typically hidden by its brightness. Also visible are stars, typically too faint to see when imaging the Moon, but with the Moon in darkness stars are readily imaged. This unique vantage point provides both a striking visual and a valuable opportunity for astronauts to document and describe the corona during humanity's return to deep space. The faint glow of the nearside of the Moon is visible in this image, having been illuminated by light reflected off the Earth.

During the Artemis II mission, the Moon and Earth align in the same frame, each partially illuminated by the Sun.

Massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy live spectacular lives. Collapsing from vast cosmic clouds, their nuclear centres ignite and create heavy elements in their cores. After only a few million years (for the most massive stars), the material is blasted back into interstellar space where star formation can begin again.

This expanding debris cloud known as Cassiopeia A is an example of this final phase of the stellar life cycle. Light from the supernova explosion that created this remnant would have been first seen in planet Earth's sky about 350 years ago, although it took that light 11,000 years to reach us. This sharp image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the still-hot filaments and knots in the supernova remnant. The whitish, smoke-like outer shell of the expanding blast wave is about 20 light-years across. A series of light echoes from the massive star's cataclysmic explosion are also identified in Webb's detailed images of the surrounding interstellar medium.

This beautiful Hubble Space Telescope image is the supernova remnant: the Veil Nebula. It is the remnant of a star that is roughly 20 times as massive as the Sun and it exploded about 10,000 years ago. The Veil Nebula is situated about 2,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.

Hubble images of this nebula were first taken in 1994 and 1997, and again in 2015. This view combines images taken in three different filters, highlighting emission from hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen atoms. The image shows just a small fraction of the Veil Nebula; if you could see the entire nebula without the aid of a telescope, it would be as wide as six full Moons placed side-by-side.

Although this image captures the Veil Nebula at a single point in time, it helps researchers understand how the supernova remnant evolves over decades. Combining this snapshot with previous Hubble observations, reveals the motion of individual knots and filaments of gas over that span of time, enhancing our understanding of this stunning nebula.

Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon!!!!

A beautiful green aurora slathers up the sky in this 2017 June snapshot from the International Space Station. Aurorae have the signature colors of excited molecules and atoms at the low densities that are found at extreme altitudes. Emission from atomic oxygen dominates this view. The glow is green at lower altitudes, but rarer reddish bands extend above the space station's horizon. The orbital scene was captured while passing over a point south and east of Australia, with stars above the horizon at the right belonging to the constellation Canis Major, Orion's big dog. Sirius, alpha star of Canis Major, is the brightest star near the Earth.