I'm always sitting in my yard with my telescope and I've never seen any flashes or sparks around the moon. Honestly the moon is pretty boring. Jupiter shouldn't be too far off the moon, look at that, it's more interesting.

I was putzing around ATS a few minutes ago, looking at some old threads and remembering the moments of certain posts when I thought of this thread and decided to re-read it. It was definitely a memorable one for me. The moon fascinates me and I'm always curious when any unusual observations are reported.

I was looking as well at the thread dealing with the so called "black box" recordings from the lunar obiter during the Apollo flights, the unscripted comments of astronauts recorded during times when they weren't "on the air" broadcasting to earth.

With those in mind it occurred to me that the phenomenon that I witnessed, as related in my OP, might have been something totally different from what I at first believed.

What I saw were four or five sparks, as bright as stars, describing a path starting close to the surface of the moon and following the circumference from the two o'clock position to the five o'clock position before disappearing. The total duration of the sparks was no more than one and one half seconds.

The thought came to me that perhaps this was a vehicle lifting off from the surface and headed toward the back side of the moon following what would be a "great circle" route from the moon's northern hemisphere to a point somewhere in it's southern hemisphere but on the dark side.

But sparks? I know sparks don't make much sense unless, and this was my "eureka" moment, the vehicle had a pulsing engine.