for-all-mankind:

Ladies and gentlemen, what you see before you is something that I don’t think has ever been done before. This is a gif of Wednesday’s Lunar Eclipse….seen from the orbit of Mercury.

In the image, the Moon can be seen slowly disappearing into Earth’s shadow over the course of an hour. The series of 31 images were taken by the narrow-angle camera on the Messenger spacecraft, orbiting high above Mercury. The Earth and Moon were about 66 million miles from the spacecraft at the time of the Eclipse.

In the raw image, Earth is about five pixels across, and the Moon is just over one. The luminosity of the Moon was increased by a factor of 25 in order to make it more visible.

While we’ve seen a solar eclipse from the Mir space station before, and a solar eclipse from lunar orbit, I believe this is the first time any eclipse has been seen from the perspective of another planetary body. 

Absolutely stunning. The full article by the Planetary Society is here.