Once in a while the Moon slides directly between Earth and the Sun such that it appears to cover our star completely, temporarily blocking out its light and creating a total solar eclipse for those along the narrow path cast by the Moon’s shadow.
But sometimes the alignment is such that the Moon only partially covers the Sun’s disc and that is exactly what happened on October 16, 2020 when NASA,s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured such a partial solar eclipse in deep space.
Since the total transition took about an hour, we show the transition at an accelerated pace.