Last night's lunar eclipse, viewed from space

Each night, an instrument called VIIRS DNB takes visible band images of the entire Earth. When the moon is up, it's really easy to see the patterns of the clouds, and when the moon is set you can basically only see the artificial light from cities. But what happens when you have a lunar eclipse? This:

2014/10/08 lunar eclipse viewed by VIIRS DNB by Christopher Kyba & NOAA
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://ngdc.noaa.gov/eog/viirs/download_ut_mos.html.
Image and Data processing by NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center.

As the Earth's shadow darkened the face of the moon, there was progressively less light for DNB to be able to see land, clouds, and sea. As a result, with each pass of the satellite the image gets darker. The satellite takes about an hour and a half to go around the Earth, so the effect lasts over 2-3 passes. Since we don't have a geostationary satellite capable of imaging the Earth in moonlight, it's not yet possible to produce an video, like this one of a solar eclipse.

For the next several days, you can access the full (giant) resolution image from NOAA. You can get an in-between resolution image from my personal webpage.

If you'd like to see images of hurricanes imaged by VIIRS DNB with moonlight, follow @DanLindsey77 on twitter:

Super Typhoon #Vongfong from #VIIRS Day Night Band - 1703 UTC today Oct. 7. ~All reflected light is from the moon! pic.twitter.com/cu8ACmwiUE
— Dan Lindsey (@DanLindsey77) October 7, 2014

Note for new visitors: This blog is about the Loss of the Night citizen science app, which lets regular people measure how bright the sky is by looking at stars. The goal of the app is to track how the brightness of the sky changes as LED lighting is implemented worldwide. The app is free, and can be downloaded for Android phones. An iPhone version is in development and will come out soon.