Hello, it's Scott Manly here and on Sunday night we had a lunar eclipse which of course meant that it was gonna be cloudy. Yes
well, I mean
I spent a lot of time looking around to see if a gap would open up in the clouds
Trying to shoot whatever I could find between it and lo and behold just about halfway through
totality we suddenly got clear skies and I was able to actually get some decent pictures and video
But some people managed to catch more than just the blood-red moon
If you look carefully around the ten o'clock position, you'll see a small flash of light
Here it is again a bit four times slower. It just turns on for like one frame and then goes away
Again zooming in there. It is really obvious
More importantly this flash was recorded in at least three different streams that people have found
So this is almost certainly an event which happened on the moon. Now
I haven't gone and done the math or anything on this so we don't really know exactly what kind of energies we're talking about
But you know for the last year 15 years or so scientists have actually been watching the moon looking for these impacts
They wouldn't usually watch during a full moon because of course a full moon is too bright
But the dark sides of the Moon they can see these flashes created by these impacts
Over the years the teams have discovered hundreds of impacts this particular
Air set of video sequences from is from a project called Midas. That's Moon Impact
Detection and Analysis System and it's run by Jose Madi Adel in Spain
One of the things I like about this kind of astronomy is that it doesn't need telescopes that are meters across
the hardware that's used for this are telescopes that you can pretty much buy online and you know a
High-end astronomy catalog, you know, they're they're our astronomy fans. I know that have telescopes that are larger than this in their backyard
Although the research grade hardware will typically use infrared and optical and pairs of telescopes a long way apart
Now one of the largest impacts was observed in
2013 and it was observed by a crew at NASA
It was observed both in visible and infrared so they were not only able to see the flash
But they were able to see the afterglow as it cooled down. Based on this profile
they were able to estimate that the energy was equivalent to about five tonnes of TNT
Also the same night there had been an unusual number of meteorites coming from a particular
radiant direction so they surmise that it must have been about 40 kilograms and
Located its impact site in Mare Imbrium
The prediction was that it would produce a crater about 20 metres across. So of course, they went looking with the Lunar Reconnaissance
Orbiter and this is what they found a new implant crater was discovered. That must have been formed between
February 2012 and July
2013 and it was roughly the right size
So this was your one of the first examples of a meteorite crater being found on the moon based on
observations on Earth. And there are many other examples have been found since then
Now it's gonna be hard to actually figure out the energy of the event because I'm presuming that none of the regular
telescopes would have been watching during the Eclipse so they didn't have this whole infrared and and
visible stuff working together in concert
They do have a lot of different amateurs that were taking pictures
So while it may not be possible to calibrate the amount of energy
There are internet sleuths already working on trying to figure out where impacted so that the Lunar Reconnaissance
Orbiter could be put to work locating it and perhaps after finding it we can get a little more clues about this
surprise visitor to everyone's lunar eclipse.
I'm Scott Manley
fly safe