Astronomy/Moon experts - please explain - BIZZARE moon in Sydney last night. Two shadows

OK, I was in the car coming home last night (not driving), Saturday 12 March 2011, at about 11:15pm in Sydney, Aust. Moving west on the M4 motorway, bout 90km an hour.

I noticed the moon on the horizon, VERY large (moon at Perigee aka 'Supermoon') and a deep red (not sure why it was so red). My first thought was how massive and red it moon was. As i looked i suddenly noticed that although the moon was cresent, it seemed to be a really odd shape.

As i looked closer i noticed that the moon seemed to not only have earth's shadow blocking the suns light, but SOMETHING ELSE creating a second massive shadow on it too.

I asked my girlfriend who was driving at the time if she could notice the weird moon, she says "yeah its big and red". What about the shape, she says "what about it?". She thought the moon looked normal. But i kept looking at it and i just couldnt understand how she couldnt see it. As i watched, the second shadow on the moon slowly moved away, like a really fast eclipse or something, until the normal cresent move shape returned.

In total it took about 45 seconds for the shadow to completely pass over the moon from bout half way across. As i watched it i kept asking my g/f how she couldnt see it, it blew my mind she couldnt notice it. In the end, i just let it go.

But it's stayed in my mind, so off to ATS for some possible answers.

What it wasn't:

- It wasn't a cloud.
- It wasn't an obstacle in the near foreground between me and the moon - the car was moving round bends and there was nothing which could obstruct my vision.
- It wasn't a plane or a blimp.
- It wasn't a UFO (i dont think)
- It wasn't something on the car windscreen blocking my view.

- It was the exact colour the shadow the earth shadow casts on the moon.

Possible explanations:

- A one in a trillion chance balloon in the sky floatng at the EXACT rate required to both block the moon and appear completely nothing like a baloon at all.
- Comet Elenin/Planet X/Niburu/Tyche somehow blocking the sun's light from hitting the moon. It's required location to do this though i assume is no-where near where its actual location is. Hence not likely.
- A massive, invisible UFO parked in Earth's upper atmosphere that's half the size of Earth. We cant see it but it still block the sun's light? (utterly ridiculous i know)


Any ideas?

For the record, about 2 hours earlier i spotted in the sky a bright green flamed object falling to the ground. Like a small meteor that glowed bright green. Didnt seem to make any impact of note at all. Possibly a flare (but in inner Sydney??)? Possibly something related to the moon?


Let's stir some ideas

Sydneysider here....

I noticed the blood moon but I did not notice anything else unusual about it.

The air force conducts many drills over the skies of Sydney, usually at night. I remember waking one night to a Blackhawk chopper hovering over my neighbours yard, I remember the deafening roar of it. Perhaps the green light you saw was mere a flare or something else to do with an RAAF drill.

Forgot to add, my camera was at home and neither my g/f's or my mobile phone has a camera in it - so no pic unfortunately.

I have quickly thrown this pic together though to demonstrate what im describing

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/151640acf9d5.jpg[/atsimg]

reply to post by Kryties


hey mate

Yeah the green meteor/flare was most likely something to do with some kind of training of some sort. Cant be 100% positive though -i no squat bout military practices Though i do remember regularly seeing the Black Hawks do training drills in the CBD right near my old building, landing on rooftops n stuff. Looked awesome

Hmmm if the object moved across the Moon from the start to finish at a steady rate, it would have only been visible for a couple of minutes. So no surprise if no-one else noticed it. I have no idea what it could have been though

This is Footage from Yesterday Night, can't see a 2nd shadow.

Sure it wasn't a hunter's moon or a harvest moon?

reply to post by cushycrux


Nice and in HD, I love it

Yeaah that seems weird, I get what you're saying and your images there made it a bit clearer. Pity you couldn't get any pics though. Don't think you're going to get many answers without evidence. Interesting stuff though.

reply to post by cushycrux


Hmm thanks for the link.Where is your clip filmed from? And how is it even possible that when i saw the moon the moon it looked totally different?
When i saw the moon it's cresent was a 'U' shape, not the 'backwards C' shape your video shows. Also, the moon i saw was DEEP red, looked wicked. yours is totaly normally. I dont get it

reply to post by srsen


It's From Elyria, USA (Ohio?).

Was just thinking, i wonder if it is possible that there was an object between the sun and the earth, and if maybe that the object was passing behind the Earth yet still was big enough to cast a shadow on the moon.

If so, then how many objects would appear perectly round and be moving perfectly steady and also be SO HUGE?? I can only thinking moons or planetary bodies.

reply to post by cushycrux


OK, thanks, so that explains why our cresent shapes were different. Im in Sydney, Australia. Possiby helps explain the red moon to. Some kind of localized cause?

reply to post by srsen


Because I'm guessing the video was taken from a location in the Northern Hemisphere, which makes it useless for this comparison.

reply to post by srsen


NZ here and saw the exact same thing. Was very odd, looked like your pic #1 when I saw it driving west at around 11:30pm.

Note: interesting that you saw it at 11:15pm in Sydney and I viewed it in Auckland in the same phase? I know for sure that I viewed it between 11:00pm and 11:30pm because I had just left a friends place after watching "US Marshalls" which finished on TV at 11:15pm and I left about 5-10 mins after it had finished.

I'm in Sydney and my wife and I both saw something strange happening with the moon last night. Its pretty rare to actually see a clear sky in Sydney these days so I went outside to check if it was going to be one of those rare nights I can use my telescope. I looked up and noticed there was something very strange happening with the moon, it was a very odd shape so i called the wife to make sure it wasn't a beer related phenomenon. I ran to get the telescope but when i got back it looked like a normal crescent moon.

Very strange, the best way to describe what I saw was that it was very elongated. A bit like a teardrop shape that has been curved into a C shape. I don't know exactly what time it was but it was after the Storm v Sea Eagles game so probably between 10 and 11pm.

reply to post by hornum


Interesting - so im not alone here! haha good. So if it was 11:30pm in NZ what time would it have been in Sydney? I'm guessing not the same time. So could it be that the object passed around the Earth and you saw it when it passed back through? Dont even know if thats possible lol

reply to post by Seagle


Wow - when i first saw it and noticed the shape, it was defintely a feeling of it looked very wrong. I know it was in Perigee, bt it also seemed HUGE. Elongated is a good way to describe it. It was only once i was able to focus on it for a 10 seconds that i noticed how there appeared to be a second shadow being drawn across it.

And you're timing sounds close - but it would have been between 11pm and 11:20pm - so unless you're talking bout Fox coverage? hmmm (and also, GO THE DOGS! )

Originally posted by hornum
reply to

 

Note: interesting that you saw it at 11:15pm in Sydney and I viewed it in Auckland in the same phase? I know for sure that I viewed it between 11:00pm and 11:30pm because I had just left a friends place after watching "US Marshalls" which finished on TV at 11:15pm and I left about 5-10 mins after it had finished.

Wow - ok then, so if it was a fast moving object, its maybe possible that it was moving fast enough to be seen in Sydney at 11:15ish and then also in NZ at 11:30ish.

If so, the only two real causes would be:

a) A celestial object: comet, planet, moon, debris, metoer, etc
b) A massive UFO.

reply to post by srsen


2 Hours behind in Sydney I think, so this is very odd. Surely someone here on ATS knows.

So at 11:15pm in Sydney you view this. So you'd think that at 1:30am I would view the same thing and not roughly the same time as you???? I don't get it!

I was driving head on to it, it was massive and orange/yellow and was in the same state as your pic #1 and seemed low in the sky. When I got onto the hgwy (North) I couldnt see it.




Did you see what the moon looked like around 9pm in Sydney?

The question:

Was it a thing or the shadow of a thing? Acceptance either way calls not for mere revision but revolution in the science of astronomy. But the dimness of the datum of only two chapters ago. The carved stone disk of Tarbes, and the rain that fell every afternoon for twenty—if I haven't forgotten, myself, whether it was twenty-three or twenty-five days!—upon one small area. We are all Thomsons, with brains that have smooth and slippery, though corrugated, surfaces—or that all intellection is associative—or that we remember that which correlates with a dominant—and a few chapters go by, and there's scarcely an impression that hasn't slid off our smooth and slippery brains, of Leverrier and the "planet Vulcan." There are two ways by which irreconcilables can be remembered—if they can be correlated in a system more nearly real than the system that rejects them—and by repetition and repetition and repetition. Vast black thing like a crow poised over the moon. The datum is so important to us, because it enforces, in another field, our acceptance that dark bodies of planetary size traverse this solar system. Our position: That the things have been seen: Also that their shadows have been seen. Vast black thing poised like a crow over the moon. So far it is a single instance. By a single instance, we mean the negligible. In Popular Science, 34-158, Serviss tells of a shadow that Schroeter p. 226 saw, in 1788, in the lunar Alps. First he saw a light. But then, when this region was illuminated, he saw a round shadow where the light had been. Our own expression: That he saw a luminous object near the moon: that that part of the moon became illuminated, and the object was lost to view; but that then its shadow underneath was seen. Serviss explains, of course. Otherwise, he'd not be Prof. Serviss. It's a little contest in relative approximations to realness. Prof. Serviss thinks that what Schroeter saw was the "round" shadow of a mountain—in the region that had become lighted. He assumes that Schroeter never looked again to see whether the shadow could be attributed to a mountain. That's the crux: conceivably a mountain could cast a round—and that means detached—shadow, in the lighted part of the moon. Prof. Serviss could, of course, explain why he disregards the light in the first place—maybe it had always been there "in the first place." If he couldn't explain, he'd still be an amateur. We have another datum. I think it is more extraordinary than— Vast thing, black and poised, like a crow, over the moon. But only because it's more circumstantial, and because it has corroboration, do I think it more extraordinary than— Vast poised thing, black as a crow, over the moon.

maybe/maybenot

www.sacred-texts.com...

Yes! I live in Adelaide and I too noticed the colour of the moon looking reddish. I kept staring at it last night as I couldn't work out why the moon looked a bit odd but after looking at your diagrams I now remember seeing the moon as diagram #2 you illustrated above. I stupidly thought it was a mountain on Earth creating that shadow (even more stupid the more I think about it)...