We are looking down on the Indian Ocean from an altitude of 25,000 miles. On the night side, artificial lights clearly define the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, and almost the entire African continent, while clouds obscure much of Europe and southern India. Our alignment with the moon and sun is such that at this moment we see a total eclipse of the Sun, however the area of observed totality is so small--only about 200 miles wide--that no observer on the Earth would be able to see this total eclipse, or even a partial blocking of the Sun at this time.

The third planet from the Sun, the only planet in the Solar System to host liquid water on its surface, the only known planet in the universe hospitable to human life, the Earth is one of a kind, our only home.

The fact that we see solar eclipses at all is due to one of the most amazing coincidences in the Solar System: the Sun and the moon appear from Earth to be about the same size in the sky. The is because the Sun, whose diameter is 400 times that of the moon, happens also to be about 400 times as far away from the Earth. The result is that the disk of the moon just barely covers the disk of the Sun. If the moon's diameter was reduced by just 6%, it would not be large enough to ever completely cover the Sun.