NASA’s Perseverance rover captured this view of Deimos, the smaller of Mars’ two moons, shining in the sky at 4:27 a.m. local time on March 1, 2025, the 1,433rd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. In the dark before dawn, the rover’s left navigation camera used its maximum long-exposure time of 3.28 seconds for each of 16 individual shots, all of which were combined onboard the camera into a single image that was later sent to Earth. In total, the image represents an exposure time of about 52 seconds.
The low light and long exposures add digital noise, making the image hazy. Many of the white specks seen in the sky are likely noise; some may be cosmic rays. Two of the brighter white specks are Regulus and Algieba, stars that are part of the constellation Leo.
This is an annotated version of the image with those stars and Deimos labeled.
“Woodstock Crater,” at center right, is roughly a half-mile (750 meters) away from the rover. At the time, Perseverance was making its way to a location called “Witch Hazel Hill.”
4:27 a.m. local time
Uhh, what timezone are we talking about here?
Start the reactor, Waaaade
Local Mean Solar Time (LMST)
Read all about Mars time here…
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/mars24/help/notes.html
“Mars 2020 (M20) - Perseverance: NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance project specified Sol 0 as the solar day on which the rover would touch down, which occurred Feb. 18, 2021. During planning, mission controllers specified a mission clock commencing at midnight LMST for a landing site at 77.43°E. Landing occurred at 77.45°E, resulting in a difference of about 5 seconds between the mission clocks and the landing site LMST.”
One of the images in this set was taken at 2025-03-01 18:37:44.42 UTC (copied from the image meta data)
Makes me wish I could camp on the Martian surface and see this when exiting the tent.