Eclipse hunters set a new record on July 11 for the longest eclipse ever observed by civilians chasing the moon in an airplane. While hundreds of eclipse enthusiasts flocked to islands in the South Pacific to watch the moon blot out the sun, astronomer Glenn Schneider and colleagues climbed to 39,000 feet to spend 9 minutes, 23 seconds in the moon’s shadow.

“We cheated Mother Nature by two minutes beyond what she could normally produce,” Schneider said.

msnbc.com

A lunar eclipse occurs when the sunlit moon moves through Earth's shadow. Click here for an interactive graphic that explains eclipse astronomy.

If you live in the Americas, you'll have to get up early on Saturday morning to catch a glimpse a partial lunar eclipse - but this one should look bigger than you'd expect, thanks to a trick of the eye.

This lunar eclipse is actually the second event in this year's eclipse parade, and arguably the least spectacular blackout of the bunch. The really big events are coming up ... including an exotic total solar eclipse next month and a perfectly timed lunar eclipse in the midst of the December holiday season.

A European satellite launched late last year has returned a new animation of the annular solar eclipse that occurred on January 15. The images returned by the Proba 2 mission are the first of their kind and part of the first set of data released by the European Space Agency. A similar, more robust sun observing platform, the Solar and Helisopheric Observatory, is unable to see eclipses. The images that compose the animation were taken about one minute apart. The eclipse was viewable from Earth for more than eleven minutes.

The Cassini mission is just a non-stop faucet of fantastic images! Here are two that were released today, for your viewing pleasure. The first image, above, is an eclipse of Saturn's moon Tethys, which lies in the background, by Dione. The three images were each taken one minute apart.