Armchair astronomers rub eyes in disbelief as “surfboard-shaped UFO” captured zooming through space!

Is the Silver Surfer real?

Yesterday was a wonderful one for the northern hemisphere’s armchair astronomers. As you certainly read, large swathes of Mexico, the United States and Canada were treated to a full solar eclipse as the earth’s moon blotted out the sun, leaving star gazers thrilled and giddy. While the celestial dance played out only partially in surf rich California, the state’s sky lookers, many whom appeared to be surfers, witnessed something “pretty cool” as well.

I just so happened to be in rustic Orange and was hoping to secure special eclipse glasses from the local library in order to share the wonders of the universe with my young charges. Alas, California’s city libraries didn’t have any though I was assured that county libraries did so raced to the nearest in nearby Tustin. They were out too and so I returned to Orange and glumly took the kids outside to witness a very slight darkening while telling them if they looked at the sun, directly, their eyeballs would fry in their skulls.

When I wandered for some lunch, later, thinking the event long over, a man thrust some eclipse glasses into my chest and said, “You can still catch the last second.”

I did and it was, in fact, pretty cool what with the rim of the moon covering up a sliver of sun. I then ordered a wagyu burger with a spicy miso sauce, crunchy cabbage and a fried egg. It was, also, pretty cool.

Not as cool as the surfboard-shaped UFO zooming though space, though.

NASA scientists discovered it yesterday and thoughts immediately turned to the gender bending Silver Surfer though, as often happens in science, magic was replaced with Korean technology.

Per the Daily Mail:

While some had speculated the sighting was nothing more than a digital artifact, others were sure NASA had captured aliens visiting close to our world.

But the American space agency later revealed LRO captured Korea’s lunar orbiter, Danuri as it soared just a few miles away. The LRO has been orbiting Earth’s moon and snapping photos since 2009, when it was NASA’s first moon mission in a decade.

And it turns out the craft is on a nearly parallel orbit with Danuri, which was launched in 2022 by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI).

The relative speed of the two objects to one another is a whopping 7,200 miles per hour, so the LRO operations team had to have lightning quick timing to capture it on camera.

In the end, Danuri appeared 10 times longer than it really is, hence its surfboard appearance.

Yawn.

Do you have any pretty cool eclipse stories from yesterday?

Please share.