Blue Ghost Watches Lunar Eclipse From The Lunar Surface – Hackaday

After recently landing at the Moon’s Mare Crisium, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander craft was treated to a spectacle that’s rarely observed: a total solar eclipse as seen from the surface of the Moon. This entire experience was detailed on the Blue Ghost Mission 1 live blog. As the company notes, this is the first time that a commercial entity has been able to observe this phenomenon.During this event, the Earth gradually moved in front of the Sun, as observed from the lunar surface. During this time, the Blue Ghost lander had to rely on its batteries as it was capturing the solar eclipse with a wide-angle camera on its top deck.Unlike the Blood Moon seen from the Earth, there was no such cool effect observed from the Lunar surface. The Sun simply vanished, leaving a narrow ring of light around the Earth. The reason for the Blood Moon becomes obvious, however, as the refracting of the sunlight through Earth’s atmosphere changes the normal white-ish light to shift to an ominous red.The entire sequence of images captured can be observed in the video embedded on the live blog and below, giving a truly unique view of something that few humans (and robots) have so far been able to observe.You can make your own lunar eclipse. Or, make your own solar eclipse, at least once a day.Like seeing the sunset and sunrise from every point on the terminator simultaneouslyAh, there’s nothing like lying on your back watching a solar eclipse.Blue Ghost is upright and functioning as planned. You’re thinking of IM-2.Actually, this is from Blue Ghost, the lander that succeeded. You’re thinking of Intuitive Machine’s Athena lander, that landed on its side, and quickly ran out of battery power. It was in the news, btw…I wonder what would happen if a 500 kt nuclear weapon was detonated on the moon. If there’s plenty of Helium-3 perhaps it could sustain a nuclear reaction?No, absolutely zero chance. It’s “plentiful” in the sense that you could refine it out of tons and tons of regolithIf a 500kt nuclear weapon was detonated on the moon, you would get a 500 kt nuclear explosion and make a pretty large crater. No sustainable chain reaction beyond your bomb would occur and you will not be have nearly enough temperature or pressure for fusion. You wll however, make a mess.Billions of tax money spent on this image..And…that’s supposed to be a bad thing?Firefly’s blue ghost is a bit more cost efficient than the past ventures to the moon. 1 launch of the Saturn v costed roughly the GDP of the USA at the time.Where on earth did you get that nonsense, and how can you possibly consider it plausible?In truth it’s barely a rounding error.The entire Apollo program spanning those 13 years cost ~$26B. Call it $200M/yr.
The US GDP in 1970 was $1Trillion.Apollo cost two tenths of one percent the GDP. Or about one weekday morning’s worth of work per year.As a fraction of GDP, one Saturn V rocket cost about a the same as a coffee break.In the words of Mark Twain, “If you argue with a fool, the onlookers will hardly know the difference.”about 0.2 billion, to be precisefor a comparison, the US gov spends $38 billion per year just on paper formsThat would include the forms required to fulfill the requirements of the Paperwork Reduction Act, of course.actually it’s up to 101 million for 10 payloads.
nice try, Elon.I think it would still be termed an annular solar eclipse. The thing getting covered up is in the… ouch name because viewing this from the moon is a relatively recent phenomenon. But there should be a much cooler name!! Terra-solar eclipse or somethingPlease be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
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Source: https://hackaday.com/2025/03/16/blue-ghost-watches-lunar-eclipse-from-the-lunar-surface/