The Twilight's Last Gleaming
October 26, 2009
On June 3, 2000, NEAR Shoemaker's imager took this surrealistic picture of Eros from an orbital altitude of 51 kilometers (32 miles). An unimaginably thin crescent appears almost to hang in space. The thin sliver of light is the far wall of a crater, still sunlit just seconds before sunset. In the foreground, high terrain on Eros' night side blocks all but the uppermost 25 meters (82 feet) of the crater's wall. The whole scene is 2.1 kilometers (1.3 miles) wide.
