Video: How the Sun and Earth looks like from Moon's South Pole
New Delhi : The US space agency NASA has released a video online showing an illustration of how the Sun and the Earth looks like from Moon's South Pole.
The animation, developed by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio, compresses the course of three months (a little over three lunar days) into just two minutes.
The space agency mentioned that the virtual camera is located on the rim of the Shackleton crater and points to the Earth. The mountain on the horizon, some 136 kilometers away, is unofficially known as Mons Malapert.
"Here, the Sun slides around the horizon, never more than 1.5 degrees above or below it, while the Earth moves up and down, never deviating far from 0 ° longitude," points out at NASA. "Earth appears to be upside down and spinning backwards. The perpetually low angle of the Sun produces extremely long shadows that swirl across the rugged lunar terrain."
NASA also mentioned, "In the second month of the visualization, Earth passes in front of the Sun, creating an eclipse. For observers on Earth, this is a lunar eclipse, in which the Moon passes through the shadow cast by Earth. Viewed from the Moon, however, this is an eclipse of the Sun."
