Anomoly

leddpipe

I was looking at the moon just now. I was using a Bresser refractor, with a 20mm eyepiece. I had a section of the moon filling my view, bisected by the dark/light side!I noticed a "light" on the dark side, not far from the bright side!At first, I thought it was just the lip of a crater catching light, but after watching it for a few seconds, it disappeared!any thoughts?as evidenced by my shoddy use of technical terminology, im a total noob!

Cú Giobach

leddpipe wrote: »

I was looking at the moon just now. I was using a Bresser refractor, with a 20mm eyepiece. I had a section of the moon filling my view, bisected by the dark/light side!I noticed a "light" on the dark side, not far from the bright side!At first, I thought it was just the lip of a crater catching light, but after watching it for a few seconds, it disappeared!any thoughts?as evidenced by my shoddy use of technical terminology, im a total noob!

Congratulations
You just witnessed a part of the Moon experiencing sunset, nice one.

Edit: Oops. That was wrong. The moon is waxing at the moment, so "our side" is seeing sunrise.

leddpipe

Cú Giobach wrote: »

Congratulations
You just witnessed a part of the Moon experiencing sunset, nice one.

Edit: Oops. That was wrong. The moon is waxing at the moment, so "our side" is seeing sunrise.

thanks for the feedback Cú Giobach.I don't think I described what I saw clearly enough though. It was a single "pin-prick" of light in the dark section of the moon. it was constant, un-flickering, and then just disappeared. the surrounding area remained in darkness.

there was no transitioning from light to dark, it was a light source in the darkness, that just ceased.

Duff

leddpipe

Duff wrote: »

you think?

Duff

Nah, I duno. Possibly sunlight reflecting off an instrument left by one of the Apollo crews?

leddpipe

Duff wrote: »

Nah, I duno. Possibly sunlight reflecting off an instrument left by one of the Apollo crews?

I didn't suspect aliens, love that meme though! yeh I know they left instrumentation behind, some of it is still operable! was unusual though! :pac:

rccaulfield

U reckon you can remember where abouts the light was? Also i wouyld look at the moon in the same conditions with same set up incase stray light is present in your set up somewhere!

jumpjack

They're called "Transient Lunar Phenomena", and they are still unexplained.

http://forum.moonzoo.org/index.php?topic=277.0

leddpipe

im gobsmacked :eek: !thank you for the feedback!unfortunately not familiar enough with the moon surface to recall its exact location!

Cú Giobach

leddpipe wrote: »

im gobsmacked :eek: !thank you for the feedback!unfortunately not familiar enough with the moon surface to recall its exact location!

Here have a read of this.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2007/23jan_ltps/

leddpipe

Cú Giobach wrote: »

Here have a read of this.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2007/23jan_ltps/

very similar to what I saw!

http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2008/05/18/23jan_ltps_resources/movie760.gif

Cú Giobach

leddpipe wrote: »

very similar to what I saw!

http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2008/05/18/23jan_ltps_resources/movie760.gif

I thought it might have been.
If it was a meteor then congrats again, you saw the moon get a little bit bigger.

Mountainsandh

Saw a documentary on moon landing conspiracy theories the other day and thought of this thread.
Some NASA or official observatory scientist explained that the conspiracy theorists never actually approached them to ask about experimental equipment left behind on the moon.
He explained that the astronauts set up some equipment to leave there for scientists to use from earth. One of these pieces of equipment, was a glorified mirror sort of thing, that they were hoping would reflect a laser signal from Earth to Moon and back again.
So this man in the observatory explained that they have a computer set up to beam this "laser" or ray, or whatever that is (I think it was laser because I was a bit shocked it all sounded so simple) ever since the moon landing, and every day and many times a day, a ray is beamed to the moon, reflected by the mirror, and gets back to us (I think he said it happens very quickly, can't remember how long though). That has been going on for years.
They actually showed it happening I think on the program.
So it's possible there would be a flash of light linked to that experiment ?
Sorry I can't remember the name of the program, it's recent, only a week or so ago.

edit : found a wikipedia on it ! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment

Rhys Essien

With these mirrors(retroreflectors) on the moon,by bouncing lasers off them we discovered that the moon is pulling away 38mm every year.

Mountainsandh

from that wikipedia there is a link to this (a whole package of stuff they left there for experiments).

And this is the pic of one of the items left on there :
there are also some pics of whereabouts the package was spread out on the moon, seen from above.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/ALSEP_AS15-86-11591.jpg