Our Moon is not the only astronomical body that can eclipse the Sun. In August of last year, the cameras aboard the Curiosity rover on Mars caught one of the little moons of Mars, Phobos, making an eclipse.
In the photo, you can see Phobos go across the face of the Sun. Note that the moon's shape is that of a potato (not a sphere).
Phobos is really a small moon (we believe it's an asteroid that Mars captured long ago) -- it is only about 16 miles wide in its longest dimension. The reason it covers so much of the Sun in the picture is that it orbits very close to Mars. It's only 3700 miles above the surface of the red planet. (Compare that to the 240,000-mile distance of our own Moon!)
If you stood on the surface of Mars, Phobos would be a dim light in the night sky, rising in the west and setting in the east, and taking about 4 hours to go from horizon to horizon. (In other words, Phobos orbits Mars faster than Mars spins or rotates!)
The three black and white images of Phobos crossing the Sun were taken on Aug. 21, 2013 three seconds apart. Not a bad feat of photography by the team running the rover on its mission in Gale crater!
If you want to see Phobos better, below is a remarkable close-up photo of the little moon, taken with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, and photo processed to make the color differences more intense:
I was reminded of eclipses because I've just come back from an astronomy meeting where we discussed another August eclipse. In August 2017, our Moon will eclipse the Sun completely. The total eclipse will be visible in only one country -- the United States -- and in a band only 150 miles or so wide. Everyone else in North America will see a "partial eclipse" -- a nice bite taken out of the Sun. We estimate that 500 million people will be able to see the partial eclipse. This could become one of the most dramatic opportunities and challenges for astronomy education in our time. But we'll talk more about that in future blog posts, as the time gets closer.
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