Here’s what the 2017 solar eclipse looked like from space

August 22, 2017

The 2017 solar eclipse has come and gone! Now, it’s time to stare in awe at all the amazing images captured by NASA, the European Space Agency, their satellites, and the luckiest folks off Earth: the astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

Yes, while you were pinching and zooming on your phone trying to nail the perfect Instagram moment, space agencies around the world were gathering the kinds of eclipse images that we could never dream of capturing ourselves.

To wit, there are already plenty of great images of shadow that the Moon cast across the country. Let’s start with a few GIFs and videos of that, made from images captured by GOES-16, a satellite that launched into orbit last November:

The astronauts aboard the ISS were well-prepared to shoot the eclipse. American astronaut Jack Fisher tweeted a photo this morning of the dozen or so cameras that he and his space-bound co-workers were planning to use, while Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli shared a close-up of the giant solar filter covering his telephoto lens.

View image on Twitter

While the astronauts were shooting the eclipse from a few hundred miles above, a very well-placed NASA photographer back on Earth captured the ISS as it crossed in front of the eclipse. It might look like it’s moving slowly in the video, but the ISS actually travels at about 17,000 miles per hour.

View image on Twitter

Another satellite operated by the European Space Agency, Proba-2, caught one of the most otherworldly images of the bunch. The satellite used a telescope that studies the extreme ultraviolet light coming from the Sun to capture this view of the eclipse:

View image on Twitter