The surface of the Moon appears to turn red as Earth begins to obscure the Sun in this image taken by the Blue Ghost lunar lander during the “blood moon” lunar eclipse on March 13-14. (Image credit: Firefly Aerospace)
While millions of people on Earth watched the Moon turn red during yesterday's total lunar eclipse, the “blood moon,” a spacecraft on the Moon witnessed the Earth blocking the Sun.
In a series of stunning images shared by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace, the private developer whose Blue Ghost lander successfully touched down on the near side of the moon on March 2, the distant sun is gradually eclipsed by the dark sphere of Earth, leaving only a bright ring. Firefly also shared a time-lapse video of the entire eclipse (embedded below), showing how the Earth slowly blocks the sun, leading to near-total darkness.
This ominous effect marks the moment of totality – the full phase of a lunar eclipse, when the solar disk is completely hidden and the Moon plunges into the darkest part of the Earth's shadow.
The blue ghost is turning red! Our lander sent back more images from the moon, taken around 2:30 a.m. CDT during last night's total solar eclipse. These frames — taken in rapid succession by our top camera at varying exposure settings — were stitched together into a quick… pic.twitter.com/BjKPXXhMLxMarch 14, 2025
The March 13-14 lunar eclipse lasted about six hours in total, from about midnight to 6 a.m. EST on Friday, with totality lasting about an hour, from 2:30 to 3:30 a.m. EST. During this time, the Moon appeared red on Earth — a phenomenon called the Rayleigh effect, in which shorter, bluer wavelengths of sunlight are scattered by molecules in Earth's atmosphere, leaving only longer, redder wavelengths of light to reach the Moon.
At the same time, the moon was undergoing totality, shockingly reminiscent of the massive total solar eclipse that crossed North America last April. With Earth blocking the sun’s disk, only our star’s outer atmosphere, or corona, was visible to Blue Ghost’s cameras on the moon. (The time-lapse video also shows the spacecraft turning red as more sunlight passes through Earth’s atmosphere.)
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