by AVERY THOMPSON
This animation features actual satellite images of the far side of the moon, illuminated by the sun, as it crosses between the DSCOVR spacecraft’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) and telescope, and the Earth – one million miles away. IMAGE/NOAA/NASA
NASA’s done some pretty incredible work over the years. With the creation of its new GIF library on Gipht, all of those achievements are immortalized in the form of silent looping clips. Here are some of our favorite NASA GIFs, as well as the science behind them.
NASA’s DISCOVR satellite has a rather unique position. It sits about a million miles away from the Earth, observing the solar wind. But that position also places it about 4 times further out than the Moon, which means that occasionally the spacecraft’s cameras can catch both at once. This footage, taken in July of 2015, shows the dark side of the Moon.
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