NASA's SDO spacecraft captures solar eclipse in space

A NASA spacecraft has captured footage of Tuesday's partial solar eclipse. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured images of the new Moon crossing part of the Sun's face in a partial eclipse that was visible only from space.

Space.com reports that SDO snapped a video and photos of the solar eclipse which made the Sun look like a "huge celestial Pac-Man," from a position 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) above the Earth. According to SDO , "The video shows today's Lunar Eclipse in a variety of wavelengths the AIA instrument observes. Each wavelength shows us a different temperature and layer of the Sun, allowing us to study the Sun and its activities."

SDO officials tweeted a message on the mission's mascot Twitter account, @Camilla_SDO: "It's a PacMan sun! The moon is transiting between @NASA_SDO and the sun today!"

The incident, according to SDO officials, caused a dip in EVE (extreme ultraviolet) output and gave scientists opportunity to calibrate the energy emitted by the active sunspot region AR1422 that has been emitting strong ultraviolet radiation into space. The AR1422 region was blocked in the Moon's passage across the face of the Sun.

An eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and the Sun. A total eclipse occurs when there is an exact alignment between the Moon and the Sun as viewed from the Earth. When the alignment is not exact, we have a partial eclipse. Space.com reports a total eclipse will take place on November 13, but will be visible only from parts of northern Australia and the South Pacific. A partial eclipse will occur on May 20 and will be visible in much of Asia, the Pacific and western North America, says NASA.

ABC News explains that the apparent odd motion of the Moon as seen in the video (see video above) is because of the relative motion of the Moon and the satellite that took the images. The Moon, according to Ned Potter writing on ABC, orbits about 240,000 miles from the Earth, circling the Earth once every 29 days, while SDO is in a geosynchronous orbit circling the Earth every 24 hours. Accordiing to Potter, technically, what SDO caught really was a transit instead of an eclipse, becaue the word "eclipse" is reserved to describe transits as they are seen from the Earth.

Space.com reports the SDO is a $850,000 spacecraft launced in February 2010 and is the first in a planned fleet of NASA spacecrafts launched to study the Sun. It is part of a five-year mission of the NASA science program Living with a Star, designed to help researchers study the Sun-Earth system as it affects life on Earth.