Mike Blake/Reuters
The first known sighting of a meteorite during a lunar eclipse occurred during Monday night’s “super wolf blood moon,” according to a tweet from astronomer Jose Maria Madiedo at the University of Huelva in Spain, who estimated it was roughly the size of a football and weighed 4.5 pounds. A Reddit user initially pointed out a white-yellow flash in the upper darkened part of the moon immediately before totality.
Madiedo, who has been trying to document a meteorite hitting the moon during a lunar eclipse for over 10 years and said he doubled the number of telescopes he normally uses for eclipses in the hopes of recording one this time, confirmed that the flash was a meteorite. “I had a feeling, this time will be the time it will happen,” Madiedo told New Scientist.