Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                               2020 January 13

                              A Desert Eclipse
                  Image Credit & Copyright: Maxime Daviron

   Explanation: A good place to see a ring-of-fire eclipse, it seemed,
   would be from a desert. In a desert, there should be relatively few
   obscuring clouds and trees. Therefore late last December a group of
   photographers traveled to the United Arab Emirates and Rub al-Khali,
   the largest continuous sand desert in world, to capture clear images of
   an unusual eclipse that would be passing over. A ring-of-fire eclipse
   is an annular eclipse that occurs when the Moon is far enough away on
   its elliptical orbit around the Earth so that it appears too small,
   angularly, to cover the entire Sun. At the maximum of an annular
   eclipse, the edges of the Sun can be seen all around the edges of the
   Moon, so that the Moon appears to be a dark spot that covers most --
   but not all -- of the Sun. This particular eclipse, they knew, would
   peak soon after sunrise. After seeking out such a dry and barren place,
   it turned out that some of the most interesting eclipse images actually
   included a tree in the foreground, because, in addition to the sand
   dunes, the tree gave the surreal background a contrasting sense of
   normalcy, scale, and texture.

                 Explore the Universe: Random APOD Generator
                    Tomorrow's picture: venusian volcano
     __________________________________________________________________

       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
            NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply.
                NASA Web Privacy Policy and Important Notices
                      A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC
                             & Michigan Tech. U.

--- hpt/lnx 1.9.0