Two bright flashes emitted from the Moon were captured in spooky images by an astronomer on days either side of Halloween. Hiratsuka City Museum curator Daichi Fujii keeps his telescopes ready just for these moments. Based in Japan, he captured the first one at Thursday, at 8:33 p.m. on Oct. 30, and the second one on Saturday, Nov. 1. “I caught another bright one,” he said of the second, speaking to The New York Times.The flashes were the fiery outcomes of collisions between objects in space with the lunar surface. They travel at around 60,000 mph and plow into our Moon with ease, as it doesn’t have an atmosphere to slow them down. The Times reports that the collisions are so powerful that we can detect the fireballs that erupt on impact from here on Earth, even if the object is but a few feet long. Astronomers watch the Moon for such events to better understand how its surface changes. “I want the public to enjoy science,” Fujii, who has documented around 60 impacts in the last 14 years, said. NASA has not publicly verified the flashes amid the government shutdown.
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