Artemis II astronauts' five lunar impact flash sightings join NASA's public dataset

The flash log is handwriting on a picture. NASA's annotated image is a screenshot from a crew member's tablet showing a visualization of a dark Moon eclipsing the Sun, with notes written across it ^[5]. The screenshot is dated April 6, the sixth day of the flight ^[8]. Each observer wrote in a different color ^[6], so every claimed flash can be traced to the person who claimed it. A reader can also see at a glance whether two or three of them put a mark on the same spot.

The instrument was the human eye. NASA describes what the crew saw as five extremely faint "pinprick" bursts of light ^[2]. The release does not say how long the crew watched the dark disk, or whether a camera on Orion or a telescope on the ground recorded any of the five. Without the watch time there is no denominator. Five flashes in ten minutes and five across an afternoon would imply very different rates of rock striking the Moon.

I'd treat each of the five as a candidate impact until an independent record matches it in time and position. If two or three observers marked the same location, that is good evidence that something flashed there. A recorded detection at the same moment would be stronger. With the flight's full lunar science set now open to the global science community and the public ^[1], anyone holding lunar observations from those days can look for one.