Thanks, that seems to be what it was, because all of that fits, it would be red from impact and it would be close.

you said it took up almost all of the sky, the moon was 15 times closer, just a bit over a mile from the earth upper atmosphere, it would not take up all of the sky, but it would certainly look very big!

Dang! So close too... Then again maybe it was 15 times bigger, I just realised that because if you copied and pasted a normal size moon then it would take up most of the sky.

Yeah? Well I'm scared and I'm going to run away as fast as I can!

Just to show how large a Harvest Moon can actually appear.

oh my GOD! What a great picture!!

I think if I saw that, I would be a little surprised initially too...

When we in Crete on holiday a couple of years ago we were outside having our dinner in a restaurant and the moon was bright red - there were 15 of us in our group and none of us had ever seen anything like it before.

We spend a lot of time in Cornwall and for a few nights outside our flat the moon was very large and pink, it was in August this year - I believe this was a harvest moon, it was spectacular over the dunes.

Here's a picture of it.

Click to view attachment

That looks like it, when exactly is the harvest moon? (I'm too lazy to go back through the posts to find out).

Great pic Reg!!!

Thanks sweetie

That's alright!

tell me if this is weird i pick up the paper this morning

and there's a big shot of a reddened venus on the cover

awkward after checking this thread doncha think

Very!

Just out of curiosity, when did this happen? I remember having a similar experience when i was younger, but I always just wrote it off as a dream...if it was at the same time tho...hmm

corthos if your talking to me it happened when i was reading the paper this morning [the winnepeg free press] this morning i still have it
if i dreamt it would dubbed irrelevant because this site would inspired it to be so.

Hehe, sorry, shoulda been more specific, I was talking to Kar-zid, in reference to the original event.

2004. That's when it happened. You had a similar experience? Can you tell us about it? I don't know the exact date but it was at night (obviously) between 6 and 10 o'clock. Maybe it was earlier but I don't think so. I can't remember what time the sun went down and the moon came up back in Townsville.

I reckon it was a combination of a solar eclipsed harvest moon and lots of cloud coverage which had been distorted red

In my belief the red moon is called a Blood Moon. It is a symbol of death, my specifically murder. It appears when something supernatural/spiritual has killed or been killed.



I celebrate the Blood Moons not because of the "death" part, but because it is a reminder that there is more out there then what we see. (not to mention blood moons are beautiful)

These exclude the Harvest moon though What you saw was definitly Harvest moon 1^^

Well, mine was much earlier, maybe 1984 or so. I remember being very freaked out about it for months afterwards, but eventually I came to terms with it by convincing myself that it HAD to be a dream (but it was VERY real, and I don't think I had been sleeping at the time).

A bit of setting, I was bout 8 at the time, and living in a very rural area of West Virginia. My house was in a valley, with tall mountains to either side, so the view of the sky was about 130 degrees east-west, maybe 150 degrees north-south. It was about 8:30-9 pm, I was sitting in my house watching TV, and my Grandmother had gone outiside. I don't remember the exact date, but it would have been early-mid fall, because I had only recently gone back to school.

My Grandmother came back in the house looking very agitated, and told me to come outside with her and look. I walked out into our back yard, and looked up. The moon was about half full, normal size and in the sky nearly directly overhead. To the south, however, almost the entire view of the sky was taken up by a huge, red planet/moon. I immediately thought it must be Mars because of the size and because I could see the moon, but it was MUCH MUCH too big, I could easily see geographical features on it, I remember clearly seeing craters and valleys and mountains. If you look to the sky, then hold up a beach ball at arms length, that's about how large it seemed. I remember being very afraid, because (being a nerdy kind of kid) I knew that anything that was close enough to look that big was probably in the process of crashing into us. I stared at it for 10 or 15 minutes, meanwhile it was steadily moving southeast to northwest, eventually passing in front of the moon (which freaked me out more). Then my Grandmother ushered me back into the house and put me to bed, still looking very scared.

I remember lying awake for hours that night, trying to go to sleep but worrying about what I had seen. The only time it was ever mentioned again was about a week later, I heard my Grandmother talking to my aunt (who lived about a mile north of us up the valley), and my aunt saying she had also seen something strange that night, but they didn't go into detail while I was there, altho she did say something about 'going in front of the moon'.

Really thinking back on it now, I still get shivers.

The object itself was spherical (planet shaped), dark red, and it looked rocky and rugged, lots of craters and canyons and mountains, but also with several irregularly shaped broad smooth areas. During the 10-15 minutes I watched it, it moved about 40-45 degrees through the sky, so it probably would have 'set' behind the mountain after another 20 minutes or so. I also remember that everything around me while i was outside had sort of a reddish tint from the light coming from it. Anyway, that's all i can remember. Like i said earlier, it really HAD to be a dream, there's no record of any astronomical close encounters of that kind, (unless it was a rocky ufo or something wierd like that).

In Cambodia, people stand on the temples of Angkor-Wat just to see the red moon as it lowers, its not unusual

If your grandma and aunt were talking about the planet, it mightn't have been a dream.

Well, i never really got any details about what they were talking about, just that my aunt had seen something, and that it went in front of the moon. At the time, I was really scared and didn't want to know any more.

Im betting it was a harvest moon, the first time i saw one i was like wtf!? but then i looked it up on google and read it was a normal occurence. I've also seen a blue moon too, it look much cooler than the harvest moon at least in my opinion

perhaps you were seeing...a lunar eclipse!

When the Earth perfectly blocks the sun rays, they pass through the atmosphere and reflect a reddish glow onto the moon. It also makes the moon appear larger on Earth. They don't last the entire night either and often times they are only slightly orange. You may have been seeing a complete lunar eclipse which is red.

You can't judge size in a correct manor by pictures, it more than likely was a harvest moon but you don't seem too open to what others have to say so i really don't understand why you posted, sorry if you take offense but it just seems as if you are dead set on it being like some really strange occurrence and that is just this huge ball of red or maybe mars came down for a little conversation with earth, anyway if it was something major trust me we would have herd about it more people would have reported it or there would have been some type of info from the space centers and blah blah blah.

From the little bit of info you gave, harvest moon, unless you were standing on a mountain and saw it come up on the horizon than that's highly likely that it looked like it was right next to the earth, but if it was just up in the sky it was just your typical ol moon, it looks red rather often actually, not like every day, but a few times I've seen it red.

...I remember when I was young and a kid brought in one of those mags that post things like "bat boy" and it said "the moon will turn red and the worlds at it's end"..i was young and thought it was true so one night i looked up and the moon was red and I was freaked, but yeah, what you said is nothing uncommon or rare or some planet coming down to the earth or whatever.

And just a note, if you're no open to opinions of others, and ideas as to what it can be that you're ASKING for, there's really no sense is asking if you're just going to try to debate something because you don't like the reply.

Interesting, maybe the school I was in front of was killing leprehcauns or the Loch Ness monster. You never know, it could have happened. The harvest moon is probably the most likely conclusion, but I still reckon the harvest moon in the images I've seen were way too small.

Very interesting, maybe what you saw orbited the world or something and happened to come back to Earth, but this time over Aus, in 2004. If that was a dream, it was a strange one. If it wasn't a dream, then it was deffinitely strange.

Really? Do they beleive the red moon brings something like good fortune, or do they beleive it's a sign of the gods?

Well that was the first time I had seen a red moon, so maybe it was a harvest moon. My mum siad to me, "Look at the moon!" and I did, but she was only excited about it for a second or so. I guess she must've seen t before, so I guess it must have been a big harvest moon. But I still reckon it was strange.

That could also be what I saw, but I've seen a lunar eclipse once before (I'm pretty sure I have anyway), and it wasn't very big.

I don't take offence, I was being open, but I didn't really beleive it could have been a harvest moon, it seemed way too big, but of course you can't tell with pictures. So you believed the world was ending? LOL, at least you got it straightened out in the end! Thanks for your comments.

Im from the south we call it blood on the moon -bad omen

Cool, so it's a bad omen.

That's some believe here, and I'm in the south too.

no idea, the day I came there you could see it a bit red before it dissapeared behind the clouds, the temples also reflected this redness.

Jupiter is a large planet, but there are extrasolar planets larger up to one and a half times larger in diameter, sheer size does not necessarily mean it has greater mass, but despite Jupiter's size it is star like in appearance to the naked eye, as is Mars.

What the OP is describing I would go so far to say is impossible. As a phenomenon it would be practically impossible for everyone but you to fail to see that the moon had grown by an order of thousands of magnitudes to take up half of the sky. Not to mention that the gravitational effects of a large body like the moon straying so close to the earth would very likely be apocolyptic.

You are either vastly exaggerating or you have a very vivid dream.

It will appear orange or red depending on the water that's been evaporized in an area -- such as coming from lakes, or dirt in the atmosphere.. I'm no scientist but I've read this is a cause of the red moon..

I saw a giant orange moon, but never a red moon...damn me being color blind!

The orange is beautiful, but the red is amazing.

, maybe I have seen it just haven't realized

this is an anual blood moon that happens on anyside of the world after a lunar eclipse...

Where I live, we get many, many big orange moons. You can see them for about a week at least once or twice a year. Might be global positioning, considering in Australia you can see the moon in the daytime as well as the night.

I have an explaination idk if it is the reason tho...

As we all know in order for you to see something the light from the object must enter your pupil and through your lens in order fo you to see it. Sometimes your lens could curve one way or another which would bend the light and make objects seem extremely large or extremely small.