Straight from the Moon: A solar eclipse, drills, images of flying regolith, crescent Earth, and more 🔥

The Blue Ghost lander captured the roughly five-hour long March 14 total solar eclipse from the Moon. You can see the glowing ring of light from the third, latter picture emerging in earlier images in the solar panel reflections. Images: Firefly Aerospace

US-based Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Moon lander part of NASA’s CLPS programcontinued its nominal streak of payload operations until just after the end of lunar dayon March 16, achieving virtually all of the mission goals it set out on.

On March 14, Blue Ghost captured a total solar eclipse from the Moon, a mesmerizing world’s first recording of this celestial clockwork that humans have previously only observed from Earth as lunar eclipses. Many people are assuming the eclipse ring to be from the Earth’s surface edges but that’s wrong. Earth is much bigger than our Moon, and so the ring glow is from sunlight refracting through our Earth’s outer atmosphere. What’s remarkable is that Blue Ghost made these observations across five hours on battery power amid surrounding surface temperatures dropping far below 0°C and peaking to a frigid -170°C. In a way, this was a mini demonstration of Blue Ghost trying to work into a lunar night, something the spacecraft repeated at the end of the local day on March 16 for about 5 hours as planned.

Related: How Chandrayaan 1 captured a terrestrial solar eclipse from Luna