Don't know if this helps, at 3AM at FL390 southbound on Eastern part of Malaysian Peninsula, was staring at the Southern Cross and the two pointes as I've done for the last 35 years, and thought my eyes or mind were playing up when I started to see a misty light coloured moon size and shape appear between the Crux and the 2 pointes then disappeared 20' later, my fellow captain and I couldn't believe it, thought it was an Orson Welles joke or a Nebula about to fry us ??????
Next day called the Sydney and Melbourne Observatories, they didn't have a clue and hand'nt heard a thing, and my captain found this, which then explained everytihng, at least the "Russians aren't coming" hehe !
Regards.
Dark Moon Tuesday 20 Feb 2007
For those of us who were up last night over PNG at approx 1710z there was what appeared to be a 'dark moon' shaped object in the sky southwest of the Southern Cross ( think the moon from Star Wars ). It was truly an amazing sight which dissolved into a cloud like mass over a period of twenty minutes. Below is the explanation from Professor Fred Watson who has a segment on ABC radio.
Thanks again for your interesting call this morning. It looks as
if what you saw was the effect of orbital manoeuvring by the
Themis spacecraft as part of the exercise to put its five
satellites into their correct orbits. Themis is designed to study
the Earth's aurora, and it was launched at the weekend. You can
find details at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6372745.stm
An animation made up of photos taken over half an hour. The cadence of the original photo taking varied, hence the varying speed in this animation. The debris from the explosion can be seen expanding from the rocket body, and other Earth-orbiting satellites at lower altitude can be seen passing through the field. The brightness of the plume varies as it fades and moves away in its elliptical orbit, but the sudden jumps in brightness and the appearance of more small objects later in the animation is due to increasing effective exposure, both ISO and exposure time increase.
Initially thought to be related to the recent Themis launch, this object has been ID'd with the help of the US Air Force Space Surveillance System personel, and turns out to be an exploding Breeze-M rocket body. They later detected over 500 individual pieces on RADAR. The following day over 1100 peices were resolved by the RADAR. The image below is a median of several images of the rocket burn and a swarm of bits within it. A median was used to help cancel out the background star images, but differential motion of the individual pieces has blurred the ones furthest from the ones used for the manual image alignment
A couple of my colleagues monitored the event - have a look at
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~loomberah/themis.htm