Thursday, October 31, 2024

Halloween Barsoomian Space Fun! Phobos Makes "Spooky Eye" Transit Of Sun -- Videoed By Perseverance, On Mars!


Do watch the video -- at actual speed, the transit takes under a minute. That gives a sense of the immense distances between these three bodies.

The waifish potato-shaped moon Phobos -- one of two Martian moons -- cast a silhouette as it passed in front of our own Sol, creating an "spooky eye" -- in Mars’ dusk-skies, a few weeks ago.

Now do be safe -- and have fun later this afternoon, one and all! Here's the NASA bit, on the video below:

. . .From its perch on the western wall of Mars’ Jezero Crater, NASA’s Perseverance rover recently spied a “googly eye” peering down from space. The pupil in this celestial gaze is the Martian moon Phobos, and the iris is our Sun.

Captured by the rover’s Mastcam-Z on Sept. 30, the 1,285th Martian day of Perseverance’s mission, the event took place when the potato-shaped moon passed directly between the Sun and a point on the surface of Mars, obscuring a large part of the Sun’s disc. At the same time that Phobos appeared as a large black disc rapidly moving across the face of the Sun, its shadow, or antumbra, moved across the planet’s surface. . . .




Now you know. Grin.

नमस्ते

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