Compact Coronagraph 1 (CCOR-1) 

Movie of the Moon transiting the CCOR-1 field of view, during the new Moon of April 27, 2025. At 9:25 UTC on April 27, the Moon partially eclipsed the Sun, which resulted in a drop of the instrumental stray-light. The instrument stray-light is dominated by the direct sunlight, so these eclipses are very useful to characterize that stray-light.

CCOR-1 is on board GOES-19/GOES-East. GOES is on a geosynchronous orbit around the Earth. It circles the Earth in approximately 24 hours, while the Moon takes 29.5 days, from one new Moon to the next. As a result, the Moon goes retrograde as it transits the CCOR-1 field of view.

What we see here is the night side of the Moon. We see it because of the Earth is reflecting some of the sunlight back on it. Although this light is very faint and cannot be seen from the Earth’s ground, CCOR is sensitive enough to pick it up from space.

Another result of the geosynchronous orbit is the transit of the Earth happening every day in between 4:00 and 6:00 UTC, resulting in the images becoming almost completely 'white' due to the extremely bright light reflected by Earth into CCOR-1's sensitive optics.

Finally, you can observe very faint sungrazing comets around 8 o’clock position on the images, between 1:00 - 03:30 UTC on Apr 27, 2025, and 7:00 - 15:30 UTC on Apr 28, 2025.