While millions of Earthlings watched the moon turn red during last night’s “blood moon” total lunar eclipse, a spacecraft parked on the moon was watching Earth swallow the sun.
In a series of stunning images shared by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace — the private company whose Blue Ghost lander successfully touched down on the moon’s near side on March 2 — the distant sun is slowly eclipsed by the dark orb of Earth until only a bright ring remains. Firefly also shared a time-lapse video of the entire eclipse (embedded below), showing the sun progressively blocked by the Earth until near-total darkness descended.
This eerie effect marks the moment of totality, the total phase of a lunar eclipse during which the sun’s disk is entirely blocked and the moon is subsumed into the darkest part of Earth’s shadow.
Blue Ghost turns red! Our lander downlinked more imagery from the Moon captured around 2:30 am CDT during the totality of the solar eclipse last night. These images – rapidly captured by our top deck camera with different exposure settings – were stitched together in a quick… pic.twitter.com/BjKPXXhMLxMarch 14, 2025
The March 13-14 lunar eclipse lasted about six hours in total, from roughly midnight to 6 a.m. EDT Friday, with totality lasting about an hour, from 2:30 a.m. to 3:30 a.m. EDT. On Earth, that was when the moon appeared to turn red — an effect of Rayleigh scattering, wherein shorter, bluer wavelengths of sunlight are scattered by molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, leaving only longer, redder wavelengths of light to reach the moon.
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At the same time, the moon experienced a totality that was shockingly reminiscent of the monumental total solar eclipse that crossed North America last April. As Earth blocked the sun’s disk, only our star’s outer atmosphere, or corona, was visible to Blue Ghost’s cameras on the moon. (The time-lapse video also shows the spacecraft turning red as more and more sunlight is filtered through Earth’s atmosphere).
As totality finally ended, sunlight peaked around the edges of Earth, creating a glorious “diamond ring” effect in the sky.
This sparkling view of totality is the result of the precise size and orbital distance ratios of Earth, the moon and the sun. Although eclipses are also possible on other planets, lifeforms on those worlds wouldn’t get to see a diamond ring of starlight like we do.
While shots like these are incredibly rare, this is not the first time a total eclipse has been seen from the moon. NASA’s Surveyor 3 lunar spacecraft recorded one such eclipse back in 1967.
This month’s total lunar eclipse isn’t just a blast from the past; it’s also a harbinger. Eclipses always come in pairs, with solar eclipses inevitably occurring two weeks after lunar eclipses.
(This is thanks to the lunar cycle; lunar eclipses can happen only during a full moon, when Earth gets between the moon and the sun; solar eclipses happen only during a new moon, when the moon swings between Earth and the sun.)
The next solar eclipse on Earth will happen on March 29, although it will be a partial one — so viewers must wear certified eclipse glasses the whole time. During the eclipse, up to 94% of the sun’s disk will be blocked by the moon, with the northeastern United States and eastern Canada primed to get good views.
