These Seven Jaw-Dropping New Photos Of The Milky Way Will Inspire You
During commissioning, PUNCH's NFI instrument captured this image of the new Moon as it passed by the ... More Sun in the sky on April 27, 2025.
The moon is completely invisible today — or is it? With the sun and Earth on opposite sides of the moon, our natural satellite reaches its most enigmatic phase — the new moon. From our point of view on Earth, it's entirely lost in the sun's glare, so impossible to see. However, a new NASA mission is able to detect the new moon thanks to 'Earthshine' and its unique cameras.
The is 0% illuminated today, having aligned almost perfectly with the sun and Earth at 11:02 p.m. EDT on May 26 26, 2025. That was the moment of the new moon when its Earth-facing side was entirely in darkness. It's a moment that astronomers refer to as syzygy, as is the moment of the full moon for two weeks on either side when the sun and moon are on opposite sides of the Earth.
This month's new moon is the third-closest new moon of the year at 223,720 miles (360,044 km) from Earth, making it a supermoon. That's a colloquial term for what astronomers call a perigee moon — a moon that is as close as possible in any given orbit. It occurs because the moon's orbit around Earth is elliptical, so it must have a farthest (apogee) and closest (perigee) point.
NASA's PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission — a constellation of four satellites that launched on March 11, 2025 — took a unique image of a new moon as it passed by the sun on April 27, 2025. Only published last week, the image is the first one ever of a new moon aside from during a total solar eclipse. PUNCH is a Southwest Research Institute-led mission that will seek to image how the sun's outer corona becomes the solar wind.
It comes from a Narrow Field Imager camera on one of the PUNCH satellites. It was able to grab the image during commissioning thanks to the delicate Earthshine light on the Earth-faxing side of the moon. Earthshine is sunlight reflected off Earth's ice caps, clouds, and oceans and onto the moon. The dark circle in the image is not the sun but the occulter on the camera that is designed to block the sun, allowing images to be taken of the sun's corona, its outer atmosphere, and where the solar wind comes from. During testing, PUNCH also captured 'space rainbows.'
The next full moon is the full strawberry moon at 3:45 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 11, 2025, 10 days before the solstice on Saturday, June 21, 2025. It takes its name from the ripening of summer berries in North America during June. The strawberry moon will be the sixth of 12 full moons in 2025.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
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