What better time for an asteroid to smack into the side of our nearest solar neighbor than during the recent Super Blood Wolf Moon.
And that’s exactly what happened with multiple people catching the exact moment an asteroid struck the moon with everyone on Earth’s surface watching.
According to FStoppers, this is the first time an asteroid is recorded as hitting the moon during an eclipse.
Jose Maria Madiedo, an astronomer with MIDAS (Moon Impacts Detection and Analysis System), caught the impact at 5:41 AM in Spain.
Jose Maria Madiedo is a member of the faculty at the University of Huelva and has spent much of his life studying this exact phenomenon.
“This is the first time in the history of astronomy that a lunar impact flash [was] recorded during a lunar eclipse,” Madiedo told NBC News.
“I was very surprised when the software that scans the images to locate these events notified me that we had an impact…But I was also really happy and excited to see that, at the end, the effort was rewarded.”
Millions who watched the eclipse captured stunning photos and even a few others witnessed the asteroid impact. Who saw it and where mainly depended on the quality of equipment they were using to view the eclipse. Needless to say, the impact was not visible with the naked eye.
You can watch the video of it on YouTube here, though.
For its part, the moon gets hit by objects every day or, as lunar geochemist Randy Korotev of Washington University in Saint Louis told NBC via email, “I’m not at all surprised that they may have seen an impact…The moon gets hit every day.”
Were you able to view the recent eclipse? Let us know in the comments!
