Moon as seen by Meteosat-6
12 October 2000 09:30 UTC
Meteosat-6 took this image during a moon-scan campaign that was performed between 08:00 UTC on 12 October and 11:00 UTC on 13 October.
08 December 2020
12 October 2000
The full moon disc occupies about 75 lines of the 410-line rapid-scan image. Image taking starts from the bottom at a speed of 100 lines per minute.
During normal earth image taking each new scanned line is slightly moved automatically by the on-board electronics to compensate for the relative motion between the satellite and the earth. This causes all other objects that move differently from the earth to look distorted. The image distortion was however not relevant for the purposes of the test.
Having no atmosphere, the surface of the moon is a very stable reflector. This makes it a good candidate for a vicarious calibration of imaging systems in the solar spectral range. However, even if the reflectance is stable in time, it is strongly varying with changing illumination and viewing directions.
This is a particular problem for geostationary instruments where the large orbit diameter leads to large variance in observation angles. One Meteosat-6 orbit was used to collect data for an assessment of existing reflectance models for the moon.
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