NASA unveils what the solar eclipse would look like if you were in space

Millions of Americans looked skyward on April 8, 2024, when the Moon passed between the Sun and the Earth, creating an extremely rare phenomenon that only happens a few times in a lifetime.

But what if you were instantly teleported from seeing the total solar eclipse in North America to space? The spectacle wouldn't have been that impressive if you had looked at Earth, and if you had looked at Earth, you would have seen a large ominous shadow slowly moving eastward across the planet. NASA was able to capture this point of view of Earth from the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), which is located on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite.

The satellite is located 1 million miles away from Earth and captured views of Earth being doused in a lunar shadow between 16:02 and 20:32 Universal Time (12:02 and 4:32 p.m. Eastern Time). As you would probably agree, the view of the solar eclipse is much better from Earth's surface, which grants viewers located in the path of totality a rare view of the Sun's active outer atmosphere, or corona. According to Michael Kirk, a NASA research scientist in the Heliophysics Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, "This view of the corona will never happen again, ever."

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