The total solar eclipse witnessed this week was not seen in the United States. NASA has released an interesting video of the solar eclipse which was visible in most parts of Indonesia and many countries in Asia. The Internet is overflowing with pictures and videos of total solar eclipse, the only one of 2016, but it’s difficult to beat the composite footage released by NASA.

The brief clip released by NASA showcases the eclipse not from Earth’s surface, as done by most of the sky gazers, but from deep space, focused at our wonderful blue marble.

The US space agency’s clip is a mash up of 13 different pictures clicked on March 9 by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera, or EPIC instrument, aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite, orbiting Earth from 1.6 million kilometers away.

The video features the shadow of the moon sweeping significantly throughout Asia, from the Indian Ocean to Indonesia and Australia to the islands of Oceania.

However, the most interesting thing to note in the video is the way the shadow moves across the Earth in the same direction as the rotation of our planet, and to think of the speed at which it must be flying across the surface of the planet in real time.

In an email to The Huffington Post, Dr. Michael Blanton, an associate professor of physics at New York University said that the speed of the shadow across the Earth differs according to the time of day and the position of the observer on the planet. The speed ranges from roughly 1,100 miles an hour to 5,000 miles per hour.

Williams College astronomer Dr. Jay Pasachoff said in an email, “The shadow moves faster near the poles because the Earth's rotation is slowest there and because the shadow is projected around the Earth's curvature -- and so the net speed is faster”. This all suggests that presence of the shadow is transitory on any specific point of our planet.