A sunset from the Moon captured in high definition for the first time.

The private American aerospace company Firefly Aerospace and NASA released the first high-definition images of a sunset from the surface of the Moon on Tuesday. The footage was captured by the Blue Ghost lander on March 16, its last day on Earth's satellite.

The photographs, captured from different camera angles, were combined into a video shared on Firefly Aerospace's YouTube channel. It shows a glow spreading across the Moon's horizon as the Sun appears to be in the midst of setting. In another scene, at sunset, the Earth can be seen as a round, bright glow. Between the two, a small, distant dot representing Venus can be seen.

“What we have is a really beautiful, aesthetic image that shows some truly unusual features,” NASA’s Joel Kearns said at a press conference discussing Blue Ghost’s operations, findings, and scientific data.

This spectacular sunset is expected to offer scientists more clues about the mysterious phenomenon known as lunar horizon glow. NASA will study the images and other data provided by Firefly to understand whether the lunar horizon glow is due to solar influences levitating tiny dust particles in the Moon's thin atmosphere, as hypothesized by American astronaut Eugene Cernan, one of the last two humans to walk on the Moon—during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972—and the first to document the phenomenon.

“It’s time for subject matter experts to examine [the photographs] and compare them with the other data we have from the mission and see what conclusions they can propose and draw from them,” Kearns said. “NASA’s science team is excited to analyze these images in depth and share more information about the findings soon,” Firefly said.

Blue Ghost also obtained high-definition images of a total lunar eclipse that occurred on March 14. “This is the first time in history that a commercial company has actively operated on the Moon and has been able to observe a solar eclipse where the Earth blocks the Sun and casts a shadow on the lunar surface,” said the aerospace company in charge of the lander.

During the 14 days—equivalent to a full lunar day—that Blue Ghost remained on the Moon, it transmitted more than 119 GB of data to Earth, including 51 GB of scientific and technological data. On the lunar surface, it carried out 10 experiments for NASA, including the first-ever tracking of GPS signals, robotic drilling to a depth never before achieved, and the capture of heliospheric X-ray images of the lunar environment. Blue Ghost "met 100% of its mission objectives," Firefly stated. (Text and Photo: Cubadebate)