55 years after Apollo 11 moon landing... mystery shadow explained! (repost)

On 20 July 1969, NASA's Apollo 11 mission landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. It was Armstrong who uttered the famous words: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." 

Nobody noticed in the initial excitement of what was purportedly the first manned lunar expedition that a few photos revealed a mysterious shadow near Buzz Aldrin.

For decades there have been heated discussions within the scientific community as to what might have cast that strange shadow on the lunar surface. There have even been suggestions that the Apollo 11 mission was actually just a public relations exercise to conceal the fact that humans had already been on the moon long before July 1969. Indeed, in 1977 a sci-fi thriller called Capricorn One was released with a fake Mars landing as its central theme. Conspiracy buffs say the movie was inspired by insider talk that NASA was trying to cover up secret lunar operations dating back to the 1950s, including underground bases on the dark side of the moon.

Finally, after 55 years, we now know what object actually cast that mystery shadow on the moon... and who Buzz Aldrin was waving at...

"Hey there, young fella, what's your name... 

and what have you got, besides bananas?"

"My name is Mooniandy, sir, I come from Kerala.  

Would you like your bananas split, fried or blended 
with vanilla ice cream?"

Eat your heart out, Mamak Kutty.

[Photos courtesy of Shanghai Fish. First posted 6 October 2011, reposted 13 July 2014 & 8 April 2016]

Missed the rare transit of Venus across the Sun? Here's a ringside view...

Launched on 11 February 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun's atmosphere, magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate. SDO provides images with resolution 8 times better than high-definition television and returns more than a terabyte of data each day.

On 5 June 2012, SDO collected images of the rarest predictable solar event - the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. This event happens in pairs eight years apart that are separated from each other by 105 or 121 years. The last transit was in 2004 and the next will not happen until 2117.

The videos and images displayed here are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum. The red colored sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171 angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is filtered visible light. 304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun, which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum.

This video is public domain and can be downloaded here.