Pagan Island, Part of the Mariana Island Chain. Image captured on March 8, 2016. Image ©2017 Planet Labs, Inc. cc-by-sa 4.0

Crank up the brightness, please.

Imaging a solar eclipse from space

“That image looks a little dark.”

That’s what we said last year, when we opened up an image a Dove satellite captured of the rarely imaged Pagan Island in the South Pacific. Was it a quirk in our imagery processing pipeline—did we need to re-calibrate our monitors?

Nope. We had captured an image during a partial solar eclipse.

The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) captured this imagery of the March 8, 2016 solar eclipse from orbit.

On March 8, 2016 at 23:19:22 UTC, the eclipse was spotted at sunrise in Indonesia, just west of the island of Sumatra. It traveled eastward, past Sulawesi, then over Micronesia, and continued across the Pacific until finally terminating over open ocean northeast of Hawaii. Some areas experienced a total eclipse for up to 4 minutes. While the path of totality was narrow, traveling over mostly open ocean, many populated areas of Southeast Asia, Oceana and parts of Northern Australia experienced a partial eclipse.

From space, the view was fascinating. That morning, one of our Dove satellites in ISS orbit captured imagery over the Pagan Island, a small volcanic island in the Mariana Island chain. While outside the eclipse’s path of totality, you can still see the startling effect of a partial eclipse in our imagery:

Pagan Island experiences partial solar eclipse. Imaged on March 8, 2016. Image ©2017 Planet Labs, Inc. cc-by-sa 4.0

Compare the imagery captured during the partial eclipse to RapidEye archive imagery of the island captured a few years earlier under normal lighting conditions:

Left: Mount Pagan, a stratovolcano, steams on Pagan Island in this image captured by a RapidEye satellite on December 1, 2013. Right: Pagan Island experiences partial solar eclipse. Imaged on March 8, 2016. Images ©2017 Planet Labs, Inc. cc-by-sa 4.0

On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will slowly move across the United States, beginning in Oregon, traveling southeastward through Wyoming, Iowa, Southern Illinois, and South Carolina before terminating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

We here at Planet are excited to scour our imagery firehose for shots of the “Great American Eclipse,” as it’s been dubbed. When we crunched the numbers, we figured out that there’s a chance of our Dove constellation capturing images of the partial eclipse, just like it did in 2016.

Here’s hoping the orbits align. To browse through more of our satellite imagery over time, check out Planet Explorer Beta, our imagery browsing tool.