Have you really seen a solar eclipse? You may have seen what a solar eclipse looks like from far away, but here’s a time-lapse gif that captures a solar eclipse moving across the Earth!
On December 14, some people in Chile and Argentina witnessed a total solar eclipse, the first, last, and only total solar eclipse of 2020. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite captured the movement of the moon’s shadow.
The gif shows a red blob moving across the Earth is actually the moon’s shadow. In a solar eclipse, the position of the Earth, the moon, and the sun line up so that during the day, the moon briefly blocks out all of the sun’s light, and the moon casts its shadow on Earth.
Here’s a closer look that tracked the moon’s shadow as it swiped over the southern Pacific Ocean, across Chile and Argentina, and then moving into the southern Atlantic Ocean before sunset.
Isn’t this an amazing gif?