Noted: Lawrence Sromovsky, astronomer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who also helped analyse the image, noted that Ariel’s shadow creates a region of totality about the same size as the moon itself — a very different situation from what we see during an eclipse on Earth, where the area of total eclipse is fairly small, and surrounded by a much larger region of partial eclipse. This, he explained, is due to the fact that at Uranus, Ariel is roughly ten times bigger in the sky than the distant Sun.
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