Astronomer captures rare footage of lunar impact flash

An astronomer at Armagh Observatory and Planetarium (AOP) has captured what is believed to be the first video recording of a lunar impact flash made from the island of Ireland.

The event, which was only the second recorded in the UK, was captured by Andrew Marshall-Lee, a final-year PhD student. on Friday using the Armagh Robotic Telescope (ART) at the site.

Mr Marshall-Lee said lunar impact flashes are rare events which are seen only occasionally, although they are more likely to be detected during major meteor showers when the moon passes through streams of debris left behind by comets and asteroids.

He added: “These are normally very small objects, about no bigger than a golf ball.

“You can’t see them before they hit the moon but they hit really fast, we suspect at around 35 kilometres a second.

“When it hits it causes loads and loads of energy. It vaporises everything and it causes a flash of light.”

The astronomer has been working on the project to observe a lunar impact flash for almost three years.

He said it is important to map out where micro-meteroids hit the moon’s surface for the benefit of any future lunar missions.

Mr Marshall-Lee said: “If we were to put a telescope on the moon or a mission of some kind, we wouldn’t want it to get smashed by these meteorites because we’ve put it in a place where that is more likely to happen.

“A lot of missions are starting to ramp up to get to these details, so we’re trying to contribute to a larger ESA (European Space Agency) mission.”

The astronomer said the observation presented a number of challenges and required a “fair deal of patience”.

He said: “You can only see it on the dark side of the moon.

“However, you don’t always have a dark side of the moon and there is very rarely a clear sky in the UK and Ireland, so it has really proven to be a challenging observation.”

Mr Marshall-Lee’s next steps will be to determine how big the object which hit the moon was, how fast it was travelling and where it came from.

He said the assumption is that the object originated from the Geminid meteor shower, which was at its peak at the time of the observation.

He said: “Normally what you would do is take hours of footage, run it through some software you write and then it’ll ping out if anything has popped up.

“I was very fortunate in that I just so happened to be looking at the screen at the right time and I saw it happen with my own eyes.

“That’s the luck of it – I couldn’t quantify it.

“It was very special to me and it will be a moment that sticks with me for a lifetime.”