August 24, 2020
The universe has spent billions of years making things that shine. On your birthday, we celebrate one of its quieter masterpieces.
Crescent Moon HDR
Birthday · August 24, 2020
A little universe, just for you
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APOD published August 24, 2020. Credit: Miguel Claro. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
How come the crescent Moon doesn't look like this? For one reason, because your eyes can't simultaneously discern bright and dark regions like this. Called earthshine or the da Vinci glow, the unlit part of a crescent Moon is visible but usually hard to see because it is much dimmer than the sunlit arc. In our digital age, however, the differences in brightness can be artificially reduced. The featured image is actually a digital composite of 15 short exposures of the bright crescent, and 14 longer exposures of the dim remainder. The origin of the da Vinci glow, as explained by Leonardo da Vinci about 510 years ago, is sunlight reflected first by the Earth to the Moon, and then back from the Moon to the Earth.
Image credit: Miguel Claro