A Solar Eclipse in STEREO

By Michael on March 13, 2007 at 1:38 pm | In Blog Posts | No Comments

This is a way cool movie showing a solar eclipse from a unique vantage point. From the press release:

The purpose of the experiment was to measure the ‘dark current’ of STEREO-B’s CCD detectors. The idea is familiar to amateur astronomers: Point your telescope at something black and see how much ‘dark current’ trickles out of the CCD. Later, when real astrophotography is taking place, the dark current is subtracted to improve the image. In this case, the Moon served as a black calibration disk backlit by the sun. “The observation was no accident,” she says. Mission controllers arranged the alignment with a small tweak to STEREO-B’s orbit last December and engineers have been waiting for the dark current data ever since.

Click the image for the press release.