Jellby <me### [at] privacynet> wrote:
> Has anyone seen a picture (ideally a photograph) of how a lunar eclipse
> looks from the Moon (from there, it would be a solar eclipse). In total
> lunar eclipses the Moon usually gets a reddish tint, apparently from
> sunset-like light all around the Earth (as seen from the Moon), I'd like to
> see this.

I doubt whether a photograph of such an event exists:

- To date, manned missions to the moon (i.e. Apollo 8 and 10-17) have never been
carried out during lunar eclipses, and to all my knowledge, traversal of earth
shadow during Apollo missions has only occurred in earth orbit; other manned
missions have never even come close to similar distances from earth.

- To date, only very few sattelites have carried photographic film cameras
onboard, and those that did probably never left earth orbit (problem of
retrieval of the exposed film material).

- Satellites leaving earth orbit often had much farther destinations, requiring
trajectories optimized for efficiency, with not much room for the beauty of
lunar eclipses.

- Although some satellites have been deliberately "parked" on the "shadow" side
of earth at the so-called "Lagrangian Point 2" (one of 5 points at which
satellitest can be kept at a stable position relative to earth and sun with
very little effort), this point is at five times the distance of the moon. As
it happens, this is about the distance at which the sun starts to appear bigger
than the earth, probably spoiling the whole effect.

- As for any satellites that might have more or less "accidentally" happened to
cross the earth's shadow at a fitting distance, pointing any optical cameras
towards earth (and sun) during that time would have posed the danger of failing
to turn them away again in time, putting the equipment at high risk of damage.


So probably the only thing we can do to enjoy the beauty of such a sight is to
do what we're best at anyway: Fire up our imagination and inventiveness, and
then fire up POV-Ray.

(BTW, If done right, I guess this could make a tremendous scene for that
planetarium showreel project...)

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