Scientists working at NASA have spent many years perfecting their craft to make sure that piece of information they provide the public is accurate and reliable. As much as they have become experts in different fields, they still are prone to a few minor slipups every now and then.
This is what happened when the American space agency's official Twitter account, which has around 12.1 million loyal followers, posted a photograph on Tuesday of what seemed to be the Earth flanked by the sun. The image was taken by astronaut Scott Kelly, who has been a resident of the International Space Station (ISS) for close to a year.
Space enthusiasts on Twitter, however, noticed that the bright shining object shown behind the Earth in the ISS image is, in fact, the moon and not the sun as earlier stated.
Emily Lakdawalla, The Planetary Society's senior editor and planetary expert, said that based on how the stars and the lights from the city at night can both be seen in the image along with the bright light source, the shining object flanking the Earth cannot possibly be the sun.
What's our new cover pic? The sun & Earth, as seen by @StationCDRKelly from the @SpaceStation. Enjoy! #YearInSpace pic.twitter.com/mjhq9qYVzf
— NASA (@NASA) September 8, 2015
According to reports, this is not the first instance people from NASA confused objects in images for something else.
Earlier this summer, Kelly posted another photograph to Twitter in which the sun and the moon were mistaken for each other. The space agency mistook the moon for the sun and labeled it as such in an image that showed the International Space Station flying above the western region of the United States.
While it can be difficult to identify the moon from the sun especially using photographs taken from the ISS, some experts make use of the stars in the sky surrounding the subject in order to tell one celestial object from the other.
This method essentially means that when the sun is visible, people will not likely see any of the distant stars even when traveling through space. When the moon is visible, on the other hand, astronauts will likely be able to spot the many stars in the sky.
In the recent ISS image, the moon appeared mostly like a star because of the long exposure of the photograph.
This latest event goes to show that NASA scientists are only humans who can make a few occasional mistakes even on social media.
