We just got some great birds-eye views of this past weekend’s total lunar eclipse, thanks to astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The eclipse occurred overnight from Sunday to Monday (Sept. 7 to Sept. 8). It was visible from much of the Eastern Hemisphere, thrilling countless people across western Australia, Asia, Africa and Europe.
It was also visible from 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth — the average altitude of the ISS — and the folks up there didn’t have to worry about clouds blocking their views.
But they did face other issues, as NASA’s Zena Cardman explained.
“It’s a challenge to catch the moon up here — we don’t have any up-facing windows, so we can only see the moon for a few minutes between moonrise and moonset before it disappears above the ISS or below the horizon,” she wrote in an X post on Monday.
“Yesterday was an extra challenge, dealing with low-angle light bouncing through the multi-paned cupola glass,” she added.
But Cardman was successful in capturing the eclipse, as were her ISS colleagues Jonny Kim of NASA and Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). All three shared photos of the eclipse on X on Monday.
“We only had short windows of time to catch a glimpse of the moon before it was obstructed by parts of the @Space_Station,” Kim wrote in his post, which featured four eclipse shots.
One of Yui’s photos demonstrated the “blood moon” effect of a total lunar eclipse, showing Earth’s nearest neighbor exhibiting a coppery glow.
This results because Earth’s atmosphere absorbs relatively short wavelengths of light, letting only the longer-wavelength reddish hues through to paint the lunar surface.
Yui and Cardman, along with NASA’s Mike Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, arrived at the ISS on Aug. 2 on SpaceX’s Crew-11 mission. Kim, and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky, went up in April on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.