Bizzare Moon Experiance

Alright, Keen, call me to task for this, because I can't explain what I saw.

Tonight, August 19th, my parents threw a party. I was there, and we saw an awesome moonrise. All of us were looking at it, and my dad suggested we look at it through a telescope. Always willing to do some astronomical whatever, I grabbed my telescope, set it to track the moon, and we were all taking turns to look at the moon. It looked awesome.

When my dad took his turn at the moon, he tried to focus it, and looked over to me saying he kept seeing this glitter on the moon. I smiled; he recieved a detached retina as a result of a call he had to fight a fire and he fell and injured himself after crashing through the roof and second floor of the building. I figured it was his eye, so I went over to the telescope to focus it. I assumed the glitter was either his bad eye, which he was looking through the eyepiece with, or it was not focused and he was seeing blury craters.

I focused it for my eyes, and looked for a moment. The moment turned into minutes. On the eastern edge of the moon when I first looked, I saw a little yellowish object leap up from the edge and fall back down to the moon. I continued to watch, focused on the edge of the moon that was behaving oddly, and saw the same thing 5 more times. After the third, my mouth started to drop, because I had absloutly no scientific explanation for it. It looked like a tiny speck of abnormal shape leaping from the moon, about 1/16th of the diameter of the moon, off of the surface and coming back to it.

I am baffled. I have no scientific explanation for what I saw. It would have been like an aircraft taking off and landing, except that the distance traveled was almost negligable. It would be like me traveling from Chicago to Indianapolis in the span of seconds. What the heck did I see? The speck, when I saw it, never started or ended in the same place; it appeared to be random. I made a comment to my dad, and others heard it, but no one really paid attention. What the heck did I see, and how can I see it again? It was extremely cool to see, something unexplained to my mind was taking place on the eastern edge of the moon. Western, I suppose, if we lived on there, but mirror reflection, it was east as far as direction matters here on earth. What the frick?

Hmmm... Well I watched the Moon rise as well tonight. There was a bright star just to the right of it. Maybe you were seeing that being occulted by Lunar mountains, coming back into view, being occulted again, and so on...

I'll fire up Starry Night and see what I come up with. That's my best guess for now though.

EDIT: Yeah, that's the best I can come up with right now. If you had even a 10 degree field of view you could have seen something like that.

[edit on 8/20/2005 by cmdrkeenkid]

Unfortunately, unless the moon has a far greater gravitational pull than I was aware of, the thing moved farther out than a star would have appeared being occulted. This wasn't right at moonrise, we live on a lake with a treeline, and it wasn't until the moon passed the treeline that I even grabbed the telescope. The moon was probably about 7 degrees above the horizon, though that's an estimate, before we were looking through the telescope, and probably about 9 or 10 degrees above when I saw what my dad was talking about.

I think it means that the crop circles simply aren't working so the aliens are now trying to sprinkle glitter on the moon to try to communicate with us...

(sorry, just couldn't resist )

hehe I didn't see glitter; my dad has a really hard time focusing for some reason. What I saw was a distinct shape like a lopsided bird that was the same color as the moon and extremely tiny

EDIT: And what the frick are you two doing up this late?!

[edit on 8-20-2005 by junglejake]

Oh my gosh, a friend of mine just gave me an awesome idea of what I may have seen. That night when I saw the bizzare moon activity, I also saw two meteors in the sky. In chicago, a meteor has to be pretty frickin' large to beat the ambient light of the city. Since the object moved in a perfect (as far as I could tell) parabolic curve, it could have been that I witnessed the moon getting struck by a massive meteor several times and blowing chunks into space that the moon's gravity pulled back! That is freakin' awesome!

Keen, please find out what the observations were; I have several amature astronomer friends waiting to know more!

Holy crap junglejake, I saw something very very similar about 7 years ago.
The object I saw was a bit on the dirty brown side and it did not move in a perfect parabola. I only saw it bounce twice a few seconds apart. Then my brother saw it once a few seconds later. We still were able to stare at the tiny blackish object for about 2 minutes or so on one spot until the consistent shuffling around of me and my brother taking turns to look at it made it dissappear.
It was amazing. The meteor explanation makes sense.

Well, it's almost been 4 months, and I think I finally came across the answer! This article talks about witnessed explosions on the moon being rare.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't go into much detail on what it looked like from the earth. It could very well have been a meter strike that I saw on the moon that warm night months ago. As this just came out on the BBC today, I suspect I'll be able to find more detailed information on astronomy.com or space.com, maybe even NASA's site.