What the HELLL?!?

Last Wednesday, July 13th, I had my telescope out and aimed at the Moon. I use it for "public service astronomy", where I set it up in a public place and let any interested passersby take a free look at celestial objects. Around 10:20pm PST, I saw something on the Moon that was so startling and jarring to the senses, I actually said aloud: "WHAT the HELL?!?"

There was a small crowd gathered round, and they all looked quite puzzled at my reaction. Without saying what it was that I'd seen, I asked one of them to take a look and describe what they were seeing. His reaction was very similar to mine. Now the remaining crowd was buzzing with excitement as they waited their turn to look at our newfound discovery.

The Moon was a 1st Quarter moon; a moon only half-lit by the Sun. The line that separates night from day on the Moon is known as the 'terminator'. Very close to that line, sitting in the dark half of the Moon, was a crater that had four glowing objects sitting within its borders. The objects looked like 4 battleships, sitting side-by-side, as seen from high above. Most objects on the Moon are round impact craters, so to see four glowing lines within the pitch black of a crater, and perpindicular to the terminator, was a very shocking sight.

We small band of amateur astronomers were very excited but stumped as to the nature of these previously unseen objects; they hadn't been there 10 minutes before. In spite of their battleship-looking appearance, we all knew that these weren't alien craft hiding in a shadow-filled crater, though we joked about an alien force poised for attack. Okay, we ruled out an alien invasion. So what else could it be? We also knew that it wasn't a secret "alien moonbase". With the conspiracy theories thrown out, we began to try and suss out the true identity of the lunar oddities.

For the objects to be on the dark half of the Moon and still be lit up, that meant that they would have to be taller than their surroundings. If that was the case, then these objects would have to be mesas or plateaus. That theory was quickly shot down because a crater with 4 large mesas inside, pretty near the center of the Moon, would be an obvious feature. None of us were aware of any such mesas on the Moon. We had run out of ideas but still hadn't determined the cause of their sudden appearance.

I broke down the telescope (an 8" diameter Newtonian) and raced home. I quickly set it up again on my balcony and brought out a camera. The 4 mysterious objects were still in plain sight. I snapped off a few images with my 35mm camera. I was using T-MAX 400 B&W film, shooting directly through the telescopes eyepiece. The shutter speed was set at 125th/sec and I bracketed the hell out of the pictures to cover all possibilities. After shooting a half dozen or so images, I took another close look at the crater and its glowing treasures. They had changed. Looking carefully, I saw that the end farthest from the sunlit side of the Moon had widened. I realized that I was seeing the floor of the crater.

In that instant I understood; unbeknownst to us at the time we first saw it, there were tiny unseen gaps in the sunlit side of the crater. These gaps allowed beams of light to splash across the floor of the crater, acting like flood lamps which only lit up a very limited area, creating the battleship-like swaths of light. The "alien attack" had been called on account sunshine.

The image above is a cropped portion of one of the photos I shot that night. I cannot find the mysterious glowing objects in any of the photos. The cropped image is near the same area we saw them, but the objects shown are just rough approximations was what we saw.