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Strange Moon Overhead
Oct. 17th, 2005 07:05 pmFor my reference more then anything else - I don't want to forget this.
I was walking back to my apartment at dusk and was treated to a huge, brilliant moon rising over the horizon. It was beautiful and I took a couple of minutes to watch it - and as I was watching something truly funky happened. I was fairly high up (as high as one can get in Iowa, really) with a good view over the town and the street lights - the moon had just passed the lights when I noticed a thin black line on its surface. I thought it was a power line and sat down to try to see around it - and the line didn't move.
And then it did - getting slightly thicker and moving slowly down the surface - for a second a trick of the light made it look like the top bit was smaller and the moon was shedding it's skin. The line moved almost to the bottom and then started fading off, starting at the left and moving across until there was just a small blob, then nothing.
Okay, so, wtf? The partial eclipse was this morning, you couldn't see it from Iowa anyway, and I've never known the Earth to leave a thin horizontal shadow. So what was it? I desperately wish I had had my camera with me - I'll have to settle with crawling the space news sites in a couple of hours and see if anyone else saw it.
So, so strange.
I was walking back to my apartment at dusk and was treated to a huge, brilliant moon rising over the horizon. It was beautiful and I took a couple of minutes to watch it - and as I was watching something truly funky happened. I was fairly high up (as high as one can get in Iowa, really) with a good view over the town and the street lights - the moon had just passed the lights when I noticed a thin black line on its surface. I thought it was a power line and sat down to try to see around it - and the line didn't move.
And then it did - getting slightly thicker and moving slowly down the surface - for a second a trick of the light made it look like the top bit was smaller and the moon was shedding it's skin. The line moved almost to the bottom and then started fading off, starting at the left and moving across until there was just a small blob, then nothing.
Okay, so, wtf? The partial eclipse was this morning, you couldn't see it from Iowa anyway, and I've never known the Earth to leave a thin horizontal shadow. So what was it? I desperately wish I had had my camera with me - I'll have to settle with crawling the space news sites in a couple of hours and see if anyone else saw it.
So, so strange.
