File:Shadow of moon over central United States (MODIS 2017-09-01).jpg

English: On August 21, 2017, many Americans saw day turn temporarily to night as the Moon passed between the Sun and the Earth to create a total solar eclipse. As people in the 70 mile (110 kilometer)wide path of totality looked up and saw blinding light replaced by a dark circle and the Sun’s wispy corona, NASA Earth-observing satellites captured imagery of the Moon’s shadow as it raced eastward over the continental United States.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor aboard the Terra satellite captured this true-color image of the shadow of the moon over the central United States. The light of the sun has been shadowed, causing a wide swath of the land to appear dark. The darkness was not perfect and clouds continued to reflect sunlight, the clouds appear white in most areas. Amber color indicates areas where the light was moderately reduced.

The area of blue and white pixels is at the point of totality and represents the shadow of the moon. The reflectance values are so low in the center of the shadow that they are outside of the values that the Corrected Relfectance algorithm, used to process the image, can effectively deal with. Therefore these very dark pixels cause artifact in the image. While the result is not a true-color image of deep shadow, the brilliant artifact does accurately represent the deep shadow of the moon on the Earth's surface.