An Egremont man claims he has captured images of the moon covered by a mysterious green glow.
Tony Bell took the pictures last week from his bedroom window in the early hours of Thursday morning.
He said: “I woke up around 4am, one hour before my morning alarm, and looked straight out the bedroom window and there it was, a beautiful waning crescent moon.
“The most unusual thing was it had a green glow around it, which was a first for me. I immediately got my camera to try photograph it, and I managed to get a few decent shots of it.”
Tony added that the glow lasted for around 15 minutes before cloud appeared and obscured his view.
The images proved a hit on social media – so we set out to investigate and spoke with the Kielder Observatory to find out more.
Unfortunately, the picture may not be as out of this world as we first thought.
Astronomer and astrophotographer Dan Monk, who regularly photographs Cumbria’s skies, said: “I’m afraid it’s nothing exciting. It is simply just moonlight scattering through hazy/thin cloud, just like when you drive in fog and the headlights scatter into a hazy beam of light.
“The green is just a result of the camera settings. In reality, the haze would have looked yellow/orange or white, depending on the altitude of the moon.”
