When Artemis II looped around the Moon a few days ago, the astronauts aboard captured a photo of the Moon as it eclipsed the Sun from the astronauts’ perspective.
Jules Verne had described such an eclipse in his 1870 novel, “Around the Moon,” the sequel to his earlier “From the Earth To the Moon.” In his story, three men and a pair of dogs are hurled toward the Moon aboard a small capsule launched from Florida, and like Artemis II they make one long loop around the Moon without going into lunar orbit. During this loop the Sun is briefly blocked from their view by the lunar disk.
In this early illustration, the voyagers’ capsule is at middle left. Verne describes the voyagers as coming within 30 miles of the lunar surface at their closest approach, so that when the Moon blocks the Sun from their view they’re too close to see the entire disk of the Moon; they just perceive a piece of a large black mass blocking out the Sun, to their alarm.
The illustration above is from a more-distant perspective, not that of the astronauts but of the illustrator. But the view is very similar to the one enjoyed by the astronauts of Artemis II, who were well above the lunar surface — some 4,000 miles — when they watched the Moon eclipse the Sun.
Jules Verne might have smiled when NASA astronaut Victor Glover exclaimed during the eclipse, “We just went sci-fi.”