SIGHTING: HUNTINGTON, UTAH (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"On the date and approximate time mentioned above, I was photographing the sunset over a flooded stock man's pond about nine miles east of Huntington,UT.I noticed a beautiful moon rise over Cedar Mountain and shot some pictures with an 18-250mm lens. Next,at approximately 6:40PM,I used a 150-500 mm sigma optically stabilized lens with a 1.4 tele-converter attached. With the 0.6X cropping factor of the sensor on the Canon T4i camera the total focal length was 1160mm at the 500mm setting. As always, I quickly brushed any dust or artifacts off the lens glass before taking a picture using aperture priority mode. Upon focusing on the nearly full moon, I noticed a triangular object moving in the bottom right corner of the moon and immediately suspected a bug and thought to myself, "easily removed in Photoshop". Between the first and second photo, I switched the camera to manual in order to bracket exposures by changing shutter speeds. I noticed the object had moved across the face of the moon and snapped another picture which was slightly over exposed. The third and last image shows the object (shadow?) just right of top dead center of the moon's face and disappears as if it's actually following the moon's curvature. These photos transpired over the course of about 10-15 seconds due to switching camera mode and slow auto focus. The ISO for all images was 400 and shutter speeds were 1/20th of a second to 1/30th at an aperture of f-9. I sent a forth photo which shows a thin veil of cirrus clouds moving across the moon's top as a "control shot."On my way back to Huntington, I thought about the object and determined it couldn't have been a conventional aircraft or bug and was eager to download the images. I've studied the images at magnifications beyond actual pixels, sharpened, and am convinced it's an opaque object because the pixels block light reflected from the moon; the dark triangular area appears to be quite uniform in all the photos and clearly blocks reflected light. I thought it might be a contrail reflecting off clouds but have also ruled out that possibility. I've uploaded the original jpegs and if you want, I'll send the raws which would probably be better at determining what this anomaly is. If you have any ideas, please notify me by e-mail. I'll eagerly await a response."