![]() Jose Maria Madiedo, an astrophysicist at the University of Huelva in Spain, is co-director of the Moon Impacts Detection and Analysis System, MIDAS for short. Try, try againīackyard astronomers and starstruck citizen scientists weren't the only ones watching. “This is something that people all around the world didn't know that they were going to sign up for” says Noah Petro, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. ![]() This confluence points strongly toward the flash of light actually being an impact. “They all seem to see the same bright pixel,” Mazrouei says. But image after image showed the same thing: At 4:41 UT, when totality was just beginning, a tiny speck of light glinted south of the crater Byrgius, a nearly 55-mile-wide pockmark in the western part of the moon. After spotting the buzz on Twitter, “I was wondering if it was maybe a local effect, or maybe something with the camera,” says planetary scientist Sara Mazrouei of the University of Toronto.įlashes of light from an impact are faint and short lived, making them easy to confuse with an errant pixel. Many scientists initially approached the claims with appropriate skepticism. The news spread quickly on social media, as people from across the path of totality posted their images and video of this tiny flicker of light. Learn what causes a lunar eclipse and how it gains its crimson coloring.Īn eagle-eyed viewer on Reddit spotted the potential impact during the eclipse and reached out to the r/space community to see if others could weigh in. Unlike a solar eclipse, which may require travel to see, total lunar eclipses can often be observed from the entire nighttime-half of the Earth. Today, this celestial phenomenon generates excitement and wonder. Nicknamed "blood moon," some ancient cultures regarded a total lunar eclipse as an ominous event.
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