April 3, 2025
The cosmos is full of spectacular things: ringed planets, exploding suns, rivers of stars across the night.
The Da Vinci Glow
Birthday · April 3, 2025
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APOD published April 3, 2025. Credit: Giorgia Hofer. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
A 26 hour old Moon poses behind the craggy outline of the Italian Dolomites in this twilight mountain and skyscape. The one second long exposure was captured near moonset on March 30. And while only a a sliver of its sunlit surface is visible, most of the Moon's disk can be seen by earthshine as light reflected from a bright planet Earth illuminates the lunar nearside. Also known as the Moon's ashen glow, a description of earthshine in terms of sunlight reflected by Earth's oceans illuminating the Moon's dark surface was written over 500 years ago by Leonardo da Vinci. Of course earthshine is just the most familiar example of planetshine, the faint illumination of the dark portion of a moon by light reflected from its planet.
Image credit: Giorgia Hofer