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‘Like a Hole in the Universe’: Artemis 2 Astronaut Victor Glover Reflects on Seeing a Total Solar Eclipse While Flying by the Moon
The four astronauts who rounded Earth’s natural satellite in April got an extremely rare view of the dark lunar disk blocking out the sun. Researchers say the observations provide unique scientific value for understanding our star’s mysteries
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On April 6, 2026, day six of NASA’s Artemis 2 mission, four astronauts swept around the far side of the moon at a greater distance from Earth than any human had ventured before. About 70 minutes after re-emerging, the crew witnessed something few have ever seen: a total solar eclipse from the vicinity of the moon.
When the sun slipped behind the lunar limb, the astronauts took off their protective glasses. “It looked like a hole in the universe,” Victor Glover, NASA astronaut and pilot of Artemis 2, tells Smithsonian magazine. “The spot where the moon was, was just gone.”
For nearly 54 minutes, the crew peered out the windows of their Orion spacecraft at the otherworldly sight, snapping photos and recording scientific observations.
“As my eyes adjust, the black hole starts to turn back into the moon,” Glover recalls. “The western edge of the moon starts to glow blue. … That’s earthshine, earthshine lighting up the moon in eclipse. And that’s when I was like, this is totally sci-fi.”
The sight was so surreal, Glover says, that almost nothing more would have surprised him.
“If it had big rocket engines come out the back, and it turned into the Death Star and flew away, it would have been only, like, 1 percent stranger.”
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A one-of-a-kind view
The total solar eclipse during Artemis 2 was an extraordinary coincidence. The moon mission had faced repeated delays, slipping back from a planned February launch. Viewing an eclipse was not part of the mission’s original plan, but by taking off on April 1, the timing put the spacecraft in the exact right spot for the moon to block out the sun during the lunar flyby.
From Earth, a total solar eclipse occurs because the moon and the sun appear almost exactly the same size in our skies—a cosmic coincidence. But the Artemis 2 astronauts were only about 5,400 miles from the moon when the eclipse began, so the sun appeared much smaller. “You see this very tiny but very intense disk of light going behind this curved edge that is gigantic,” Glover says.
The astronauts used eclipse glasses, just like the ones on Earth, and they could feel the sun’s heat on their faces as it set. During totality, they could make out craters on the moon’s darkened surface and stars in the faint glow around it.
“While the sun was behind the moon, I have not found a good word for this, but it was eerie, spooky,” Glover says.
His comments echo those made by NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin 57 years prior, when the crew of Apollo 11 passed through the shadow of a total solar eclipse on their way to the moon. “It’s quite an eerie sight,” Aldrin radioed to mission control on July 19, 1969.
On both Apollo 11 and Artemis 2, the astronauts could see the ethereal solar corona, or the sun’s wispy and faint outer atmosphere, which is typically hidden by the star’s bright light.
“The three-dimensionality of it is what the pictures can’t really replicate well,” Glover says. “The depth of the corona was astounding, and because of our relative motion, it also looked as if it was moving. It wasn’t waving like hair, but it kind of looked like hair, and it almost just kind of slowly rotated.”
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Michael Kirk, a solar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, says that this dynamic view of the corona can provide valuable scientific data.
“Right now, almost all of our observations of that solar corona are from the sun-Earth line,” Kirk says. “Artemis is a really exciting next step … where we’re getting the images of the sun that’s just a little bit separated from our typical point of view. And that’s incredibly valuable when you’re trying to disentangle complex structure.”
Did you know? The next solar eclipses
A total solar eclipse on August 12 will darken skies across some portions of Greenland, Iceland, Spain, Portugal, Russia and the Atlantic Ocean. Next year, another total solar eclipse—nicknamed the “eclipse of the century” because of its long duration—will sweep over parts of Africa, Europe and the Middle East.
From Earth or space, total solar eclipses provide opportunities to study the corona and the energetic outbursts released by the sun. These include solar prominences, which are tendrils of plasma that snake out from the star’s surface, and coronal mass ejections, which are eruptions that blast charged particles and magnetic fields out into space.
A better understanding of these phenomena can reveal how they might affect Earth’s atmosphere and satellites. And as humanity prepares to send people back to the moon, Kirk says, tracking solar weather will become a critical part of protecting astronauts in space.
“How does a small disturbance of the sun leave? What changes as it comes to Earth? And how can we make a prediction?” asks Kirk. “Those sorts of questions are still all very open.”
For other solar observations, scientists use instruments called coronagraphs to artificially block out sunlight so features near the surface of the sun can be observed. But there is no replacement for total solar eclipses, when the moon obscures more sunlight than a coronagraph can filter out.
“When we have an eclipse, it really gives us this opportunity to really see low down in the solar atmosphere that we are typically blind to, even with our current technologies,” says Laura Hayes, a solar physicist at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
Tracing bits of the solar system
Though the eclipse images from Artemis 2 were taken with simple cameras, the observations are already revealing new details about the environment around the sun. A recent study analyzed the mission’s photos to map the F-corona, which is not actually part of the sun but rather a glow near the sun generated as light reflects off surrounding dust.
“It is the innermost extension of the zodiacal light—the same interplanetary dust cloud that creates the faint glow sometimes visible in the night sky after sunset or before sunrise,” says Kohji Tsumura, a researcher at Tokyo City University and an author of the new study.
The analysis revealed a surprise. The F-corona, as seen by Artemis 2, was more rounded than expected—the cloud of dust surrounding the sun appears to be less flattened than researchers had assumed from a model of the large-scale dust cloud that permeates the plane of the solar system.
“One of the longstanding questions in planetary science is where the dust responsible for the zodiacal light and the F-corona comes from,” Tsumura says. “The leading ideas are that it is produced either by collisions between asteroids or by material released from comets. Once created, the dust gradually migrates inward toward the sun.”
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Since models of the F-corona do not match the more rounded structure seen during Artemis 2, there appears to be another part of this process that remains unexplained. Perhaps, Tsumura says, as the dust gets pulled toward the sun, some other mechanism lifts or stirs the particles away from the central plane of the dust cloud.
“By studying how dust moves, evolves and is ultimately removed near the sun, we can learn more about the circulation of matter in the solar system and about the physical processes that shape planetary systems in general,” he says.
The amount of detail gleaned from the Artemis 2 photographs came as something of a surprise, and it showed how valuable even simple images of a solar eclipse taken near the moon can be.
“The key thing for this study is it’s showing you can actually do some really amazing science with a handheld camera from a window,” the Dublin Institute’s Hayes says.
Ambassadors of wonder
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Aside from the scientific intrigue, solar researchers Kirk, Hayes and Tsumura all say there was something deeply moving about watching the astronauts of Artemis 2 witness a total solar eclipse in space. It was an opportunity to learn about the sun, but it was also a chance to share an extraordinary experience with the crew and with the rest of the world.
“There’s an element of absolute beauty and awe,” Kirk says. “I’ve seen the moon a thousand, a hundred thousand times. I’ve seen eclipses—total eclipses, annular eclipses—a dozen times. But seeing this was absolutely different and really breathtaking, because it’s rare that you see something that’s so familiar and so distant at the same time.”
“It made it feel real,” Hayes says. “You’re like, ‘Wow, that’s what they see out the window.’ That made it more human to me.”
“My first reaction was simply amazement,” Tsumura says.
For Glover, sharing the experience with other people is a core part of the drive to explore.
“If there is any one thing that I want to share from this mission, it’s that wonder and awe are out there, whether we get to see it or not,” Glover says. He wants the Artemis 2 crew to become “ambassadors of that wonder.”
“You know, the magic of seeing something so moving, it’s not just for the four of us to share amongst ourselves,” he says. “It’s to hopefully give people a way to connect with that thing that was amazing.”
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