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Sept. 2, 2008: There's more than one way to watch a meteor shower.

One, the old-fashioned way: Find a dark place with starry skies and count the meteors streaking overhead. Two, the new way: Find a dark place with starry skies and then completely ignorethe meteors. Instead, watch the Moon. That's where the explosions are.

On August 9th, a pair of amateur astronomers on opposite sides of the United States did it the new way. With the Perseid meteor shower just underway, they fixed their cameras on the Moon and watched meteoroids slam into the lunar surface. Silent explosions equivalent to ~100 lbs of TNT produced flashes of light visible a quarter of a million miles away on Earth. It was a good night for "lunar Perseids."

"I love watching meteor showers this way," says George Varros, who recorded this impact from his home in Mt. Airy, Maryland:

The flash, which lit up a nighttime patch of Mare Nubium (the Sea of Clouds), was a bit dimmer than 7th magnitude--"an easy target for my 8-inch telescope and low-light digital video camera."

Hours later, another Perseid struck, on the western shore of Oceanus Procellarum (the Ocean of Storms). This time it was Robert Spellman of Azusa, California, who caught the flash. "It's exciting to witness these explosions in real time," he says. "I used a 10-inch telescope and an off-the-shelf Supercircuits video camera."

Rob Suggs of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office has reviewed the data. "They look real to me," he says. "The flashes appear in multiple video frames and the light curves are similar to other lunar meteors we've recorded in the past."

Suggs would know. Along with colleague Bill Cooke, he leads a team at the Marshall Space Flight Center that has recorded more than 100 lunar explosions since 2005. "We monitor lunar meteors in support of NASA's return to the Moon," Suggs says. "The Moon has no atmosphere to protect the surface, so meteoroids crash right into the ground. Our program aims to measure how often that happens and answer the question, what are the risks to astronauts?"

Above: A map of 100 lunar meteors observed by astronomers at the Marshall Space Flight Center since 2005. Every impact on the map was bright enough to see with an amateur telescope. [more]

NASA's official lunar meteor observatories are located in Alabama and Georgia. Both were off-line on August 9th, so the NASA team didn't see how many Perseids were hitting the Moon that night.