Acquired January 15, 2010, this true-color image shows India and the Bay of Bengal, both darkened by an annular eclipse. A white line marks the Indian coastline.
NASA’s Terra satellite was rounding the top of the globe, making its way from the eastern tip of Siberia and across the Arctic Ocean towards northern Norway and northwest Russia, when it captured this unique view of a total solar eclipse on August 1, 2008.
As millions of people looked up at the Sun during the total solar eclipse, a sensor on NASA’s Terra satellite kept its gaze fixed on Earth and collected imagery of the Moon’s shadow over the United States.
The Moon’s shadow engulfed Taiwan and a large swath of southeastern China and the Pacific Ocean on the morning of July 22, 2009, during an unusually long total eclipse of the Sun.