ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Remote Sens.
Sec. Multi- and Hyper-Spectral Imaging
This article is part of the Research TopicEarth Observations from the Deep Space: 10 Years of the DSCOVR MissionView all 16 articles
Gaia's Crown: A Deep Space Mirage Seen From DSCOVR/EPIC During Lunar Transit
Provisionally accepted
- 1NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, United States
- 2University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, United States
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The Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), onboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft, located at the Earth-Sun Lagrange 1, has captured a unique optical effect during lunar occultation named "Gaia's Crown." In EPIC images, the phenomenon appears as a small "flange" at the Earth–Moon contact when the Moon is roughly half below Earth's limb; it is present in the visible and near-infrared channels but absent in the ultraviolet. Using atmospheric data and 3D, voxel-based ray tracing models, this effect was identified as a combination of atmospheric distortion and a complex mirage caused by variations in the Earth's atmosphere. Additionally, it is shown that while satellites closer to the Earth can see a similar phenomenon, Gaia's Crown presents unique distortion effects that demonstrate how EPIC's vantage point at 1.5 million kilometers from Earth provides a different perspective on atmospheric optics.
Keywords: DSCOVR, epic, atmospheric optics, MIRAGE, GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite), Himawari 8
Received: 03 Jun 2025; Accepted: 24 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Blank, Herman, Dangelo, Marshak and Tennenbaum. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Karin Blank, karin.b.blank@nasa.gov
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