SpaceX films total solar eclipse from satellite as Elon Musk touts free Starlink Internet

The total solar eclipse which darkened North America for the good part of four minutes is now done and dusted, with the next eclipse happening to those who'll be around in 2044.

That notion apparently forced many to try and film the eclipse with various success as even NASA warned how not to take pictures of the eclipse with your phone as that may fry its camera sensor.

The Starlink cameras, however, had no such problem, and SpaceX posted a nice video of the solar eclipse as seen from the point of view of a Starlink satellite in orbit.

The SpaceX gear managed to capture a beautiful view of the moon blocking the sun in the form of a dark circle. The rotating Earth sent it across North America - from Mexico to Canada - in a band, while covering parts of the contiguous United States.

Elon Musk gave SpaceX some X time to showcase the footage of the eclipse and give it a wider audience, but also bandied Starlink about for other reasons.

He is currently embroiled in one of his proverbial X fights, this time with Brazil's Supreme Court that ordered X to shut down several accounts linked to the post-electoral insurrection there. Musk defied the order while predicting that X "will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there," advocating for the use of VPN to access.

To counterbalance the image of an overseas billionaire meddling in a foreign country's media market, however, Elon Musk announced that Brazilian schools will get Starlink satellite Internet gratis.

"Starlink will provide free Internet for schools in Brazil if the government won’t honor their contract," he said, referring to the threats to end all local federal projects in which his companies are involved.

The Robin Hood move comes hot on the heels of the announcement that Starlink has managed to enlarge its subscriber base by the whopping 500,000 users in just four months.

SpaceX also just launched the next batch of satellites with direct-to-cell capability, with which it recently hit 17 Mbps download speeds on a regular Samsung Galaxy carrier phone.

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