DSCOVR lets you can see hourly photos of the entire earth from the L1 Sun-Earth Lagrange point

submitted by zyxzevn from epic.gsfc.nasa.gov

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[–]JasonCarswell 1 insightful - 3 fun1 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 3 fun -  (2 children)

Very cool!

Shouldn't there be some kind of shadow on the Earth (unless the moon just happens to be exactly in line with the Sun at this moment - which is actually close to being fully in shade according to my desktop moon calendar)?

Anyone know of anything else at L1?

My "epic" story, Bittersweet Seeds (which I plan to withdraw for a few months to finish the first draft), features in Act 3B a launch, trip, and arrival to a L1 space station for an intrasolar exploratory expedition launch and of course the grande finale.

[–]NeilAnami 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/moon/location.html

The moon has to be between the sun and earth to cast a shadow on the earth. Which it's not on the day those pics were taken.

[–]JasonCarswell 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

No, I wasn't talking about the Moon casting a shadow on the Earth (an eclipse to anyone on the Earth).

I was talking about the L1 position being between the Earth and the Moon, viewing the Earth from the same angle as the moon (though with slightly different perspective). The moon happens to look like a sliver in the sky (waxing crescent or waning crescent, currently the latter), therefor the Earth should have the inverted lighting, with just a sliver of shadow. However due to the perspective I'm guessing, the shadow is too far around the curve of the Earth to be visible, and/or, the atmosphere isn't making a hard visible sliver-shadow (waxing gibbous or waning gibbous).