The Eclipse via Satellite | Hacker News Reader

The Eclipse via Satellite

kieranhealy.org

175 pointsapwheele17 comments

Another eclipse video, this time from Starlink satellite: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1bz9ltv/solar_eclip...

Very cool and a little ominous looking, like something in a Marvel movie with a a black hole eating the Earth…

That animation is bonkers! I don't recall ever seeing anything similar for previous eclipses, it's a great visualization for the scale of things.

Here is a previous eclipse I strung together a few years ago from Himawari-8, a JAXA satellite: https://earth.apawl.com/eclipse/earthimagesequence/1280-h264...

This is stunning!

ffmpeg plus still images are a cool way to make an animation. A very, very long time ago I did the same with EVE Online sovereignty maps that got updated once a day. (it was back in the Band of Brother vs Goonswarm days, so ancient history)

I loved those days. (Was Suddenly Ninjas myself, here)

Great work!

Is that animation fake or edited?

Why is the night sky (no direct light) showing clouds as bright white objects but the solar eclipse is basically a totally black hole?

How could that even work? The side facing away from the sun should be just as dark as the centre of the eclipse.

The ABI on GOES-16 is not exactly like a camera. Instead it collects light across different spectral bands and stores them independently. So when you see a color image from GOES, it's actually a composite of specific bands. I don't know how NESDIS (source of the imagery here) does it, but a common way to produce "true color" imagery for this class of satellites is to superimpose their red band, their blue band, and an interpolated "green" band.

The ABI also collects shortwave infrared light, which is still possible to observe at night. Since the satellite's normal use is for atmospheric weather observations, it's common to show the SWIR bands at night so that that clouds are still visible.

That makes sense. But would that mean the eclipse and the normal night period were constructed differently?

Yes, the daytime imagery does not use the SWIR band which is why it looks totally dark. Here is an eclipse image with the SWIR band: https://i.postimg.cc/zf6yHXSy/IMG-5031.png

Thank you!

NASA was showing some views of the shadow from the ISS as part of their coverage.

https://youtu.be/_mnL83o5tBY?si=3xnzJd6eqH2E_ulS

Author of the magisterial Using Metadata to find Paul Revere

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

For anyone else looking for the link.

Now I understand why the start and ends of eclipse tracks are flat... because of night time...

Obvious now that I've seen it.

What do you mean flat

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