Moon Ripper

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status: alpha

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© 2026 Ansel Parker. All rights reserved.

This is a private draft shared for personal reading and feedback only. No redistribution, reposting, recording, or AI training or use without written permission.

Hot Pixels

MV Borealis, Bering Sea. Late March, 09:13 Ship's time. Terrence is on the main deck.

"Sunrise in two minutes," crackled from the ship's PA. In the dim pre-dawn, chunks of ice stretched to the horizon. "Fake sunrise!" someone shouted from elsewhere on deck. Laughter floated up from the crowd, mixed with the click of plastic tripod locks and clatter of gear.

Dozens of others, most of them tourists, had strapped their cameras and telescopes to the metal railing. All pointed starboard. East. Terrence's breath ghosted up through the downward glow of the ship's deck lights, mingling with the other plumes rising from the crowd.

He wasn't actually supposed to have a spot on the railing. But he'd seen a gap and set up there anyway. There was zero point in being the only one with an obstructed view, just because of a stupid rule.

None of the passengers would really care. And the worst they could do was fire him. So he’d moved.

The partial eclipse had already started half an hour earlier, and would continue afterward. Totality, though, would be over in a blink. Just over two minutes. No room for mistakes.

A gust of wind cut across the deck. Shoulders rose and hoods tightened. The couple next to him passed filters and lens caps to each other wordlessly. They'd probably rehearsed this a thousand times.

Terrence glanced back toward the bridge. They wouldn't make me move now, right?

He looked over his rig, making sure it was cinched tight. He'd splurged on a mirrorless camera with a long zoom. That was on the good tripod, and beside it was a little telescope for visual checks.

Shit. Ice on the focus ring.

He took off a glove and brushed bits of frost off the zoom lens. The bitter cold immediately pinched his fingers. He blew through his fist and pulled the glove back on.

“Sunlight!” someone shouted. Terrence looked through the telescope. He saw the ice-studded horizon, with the single sharp horn of the Sun's crescent writhing through the Arctic air. He watched it slowly emerge above the ocean's edge.

Am I recording? He checked. Yes, still recording, tight on that rising horn.

Someone whooped. More voices across the deck joined in.

Terrence put his eye to the eyepiece again. The Sun itself was half risen. But the Moon covered most of it from the right, leaving only a small part of the Sun’s crescent visible.

"Totality in 5 minutes," came over the PA.

He bent over his telescope again. The last sliver of the Sun's crescent emerged over the horizon, as it thinned to nothing. While he watched, the Moon covered all but one last brilliant bit of the Sun, forming the diamond ring.

"Beads!" someone yelled.

As the beads flashed and faded, cracking ice echoed over the ocean. Darkness swept across the sky from right to left. Stars reappeared.

"Totality starts now," announced the PA.

Naked-eye time.

Terrence yanked the solar filter off the front of his camera and looked directly at the eclipse. The Sun's corona bloomed behind the Moon. The cosmic gulf between the Earth and Moon hit him. A frisson shivered down his arms and back, under the thick jacket.

They were all just tiny specks on the surface of a vast planet. He was glimpsing a realm of giants.

"Wow."

He checked his camera monitor. Still recording. "Beautiful," he said.

What's that?

A dot. On the lunar disk, just inside the rim to the right. He tapped the screen. Do I have a bad pixel?

Back to his telescope. The dot was there too.

It's brightening.

Should I zoom in and blow the shot I came all this way for?

Damn it. I'll miss the corona.

This could be huge. Get the fucking shot.

Heart pounding, he centered the dot on his monitor and punched the crop button.

Lost it.

He hunted, found it. Muscle memory kicked in: zoom, recenter, zoom, recenter, each correction jerky, too fast, then not enough. It flashed bright for a few seconds, then vanished.

"Huh."

Telescope again. Nothing. He zoomed back out to the wide shot. No dot.

A murmur of conversation rose from the deck. "Did you see that?" he said to the bearded guy next to him.

"See what?"

"A bright dot on the Moon, just inside the rim. It was on my screen and in the telescope. What could it be?"

"A satellite glinting?"

"Maybe…"

"Twenty seconds to third contact," came over the PA.

The sound of raised voices floated down from midships. Terrence clipped the solar filter back on and watched Baily's beads emerge again on the north side of the Sun, followed by the diamond ring.

"Third contact. End of totality, glasses on," the PA said.

Terrence zoomed back out and slid on his eclipse glasses as the Sun's crescent slowly reappeared.

A gust of wind carried voices from somewhere midships, and Terrence heard a heated fragment: "…not possible! You wouldn't observe it in two…"

Terrence removed his eclipse glasses and looked toward the sound. A cluster of parka-clad figures stood on the bridge wing. One arm jabbed out, palm up, gesturing at the eclipse. Were they talking about the flash?

He did a quick check of his camera. Still recording. He wound his way between rigs, ducking and weaving to avoid spoiling footage.

At the base of the superstructure, with tripods and cameras jammed along the rail, he looked up. He called out, "Are you guys talking about the flash of light?"

None of them seemed to notice him. It was two decks up, and windy. Maybe they didn't hear him.

"I saw it," a voice behind him said, bright and confident.

Terrence turned around. She was in a dark, fur-lined parka, with a knitted wine-colored face-warmer covering all but her eyes. Eclipse glasses hid even those. She was sitting on a small folding chair, surrounded by a nest of cameras and laptops.

He stepped toward her. "The flash of light, right? A tiny dot just inside the limb to the south?"

"Yep," she said. "It was only there for a couple of seconds, but I saw it."

"Did you capture it?"

She gestured toward the biggest camera. "I got it. I'm still recording. I can show you when it's over."

"I was like, I have to zoom in. So I did. I didn't see any more detail. It was still just a dot even at full tight, 400 millimeters." He held out his hand. "Terrence."

"Kira." Her voice was muffled by the face-warmer. She shook his hand firmly. "That was quick thinking. Zooming in." A strand of brown hair blew across one eye, and she tucked it back into her hood. As she did, the dark red of her nails flashed against the black leather of her fingerless gloves.

Kira reached up to tweak the angle on her phone, mounted beside her and recording, then slipped both hands back into a fluffy grayish hand-warmer at her waist.

Hand warmer. Smart. Why didn't I think of that?

"Yeah, it was split-second," Terrence said. "I was like, should I ruin my shot for this? Hope we get something out of it." He pointed at her camera. "You've got a matte-box. What's your rig?"

"It's a landscape setup. Mirrorless on sticks. Soft grad on the horizon. Keeps the sky from blowing out. What's yours?" She turned slightly toward him in her chair and slipped off her eclipse glasses. Her eyes settled on him and held. Somehow, even out here on the freezing deck, she looked high-definition. Intentional.

"Mirrorless on sticks too. With a 400-millimeter zoom. I wanted to get really tight on that rising crescent horn, then zoom out for the corona."

"You're not one of the tourists, are you?"

Was it that obvious?

"No, I came on at the last minute to help with ship's comms. How did you know?"

She shrugged. “You look a little unprepared. Most people here have been planning this trip for months.”

"An impact wouldn't have that brightness profile," a voice floated down from above, sharp with certainty.

Terrence looked up again.

They’re already debating it. If I don't get in there now, I’ll miss my chance.

He glanced back at his rig. He could just see part of it through the forest of tripods and cameras on the deck.

Someone might mess with it.

He’d grab the video and put in a new card. Then keep recording.

"I'm gonna check my rig. Be right back," he said and wound his way to his camera. He stopped recording, pushed in an empty card, hit record.

Better back it up to the cloud.

He shoved the card into his laptop and copied the video, then kicked off an upload. The progress bar sat at zero percent for more than a minute before ticking over. "Throttling. That's going to take hours," he muttered.

Back at the superstructure, he stopped to talk to Kira again. "I've got the recording. I'm going up there. Coming?"

"I'm staying here. Good luck," she said.

He pulled open the heavy side door, found the stairway, and headed up. At the top, a bridge officer stood inside with his back to the door. Terrence knocked, and the officer turned around. Terrence flashed his crew card. The officer shook his head.

He talked through the closed door. "I have hi-res footage of an eclipse anomaly. I've gotta talk to those guys."

"Bridge staff only. We're in ice ops," came the muffled reply.

Damn. Try a different angle.

He went back down. The group had shifted toward the stern and was now peering at a monitor, pointing and talking.

He’d have to yell.

Terrence cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted. "I have footage of the flash of light at a 400 millimeter zoom!" One of them looked over the edge. Terrence waved.

The person spoke briefly to the others and then came over to the rail above him. "Come up to the bridge door," she called down, and disappeared inside.

If he went in, he’d miss the rest of the eclipse. But if they were already debating it, he had to get his video in front of them before their opinions hardened from “weird” to “nothing.”

He put his eclipse glasses on and took a last look. The Sun was bright now, a thick crescent, angling slowly up into the sky. As he took the glasses off, he found himself taking another glance at Kira. She was absorbed in her laptop, typing.

He ducked inside and climbed back up, his boots clanking on the rusty metal-grated stairs.

The officer stood with his back to the bridge door. Inside, the scientist was speaking rapidly to the captain, her hood flapping awkwardly behind her head. Terrence caught only snatches of the conversation above the muffled drone of the busy bridge.

"…unexpected event…urgent to get…"

The captain shook his head, arms crossed, and cut the scientist off with a clipped "not now."

The scientist turned and walked over to Terrence, opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.

"Hi, I'm Elise. I'm on the science team." She wore a black parka and had a green scarf wrapped around her face. Her gray-blue eyes fixed on Terrence behind her glasses as she stuck out her hand. He shook it.

"Terrence, ship's comms. You guys are talking about the light flash just inside the limb on the south side, right?"

"Yes, we’re not sure what it was yet," Elise said. "What did you see?" Her glasses fogged a little with each sentence.

"I saw the flash of light and zoomed in. Got to nearly 400 millimeters before it winked out. I don't think it could have been a satellite though. It would have been inside the Moon's shadow."

"Maybe. Do you have the recording?”

Terrence held up the SD card. "It's on this."

Elise looked at him steadily, eyes narrowed. "Stay here." She went back in.

Terrence waited outside the door. After a few minutes, a bearded scientist came in and spoke with the captain. Finally, the captain raised a finger, emphasizing a point. The bearded scientist left, and the captain walked over to the bridge door and opened it.

"I’m making an exception for you, Terrence. Stay off the bridge as much as possible. I don't want lots of coming and going. I trust you understand the situation. We need full crew attention on ship's operations today. We're in an ice field." He walked away.

Terrence stepped into the bridge. The warm, bone-dry air scraped in his nostrils. The steady thrum of the HVAC system hummed under the bark of navigation orders. Tension held the room in a physical grip. Officers bent over glowing red radar monitors, the smell of cheap coffee mingling with the cloying, synthetic sweetness of apple-cinnamon instant oatmeal. Even the way they sipped their coffee was careful.

The thin light of the waning eclipse slanted through the huge angled windows, edged with frost. He followed Elise to the starboard door. As it opened, the cold knifed in, snapping at his parka lining. The bridge-wing door clunked shut, the gasket sealing away the precious warmth with a heavy thud. Elise led him to the bearded scientist. He was taking notes from the display on a large white cube that was mounted on the railing.

"Professor Camden, this is Terrence."

Professor Camden's beard was untrimmed, flecked with gray. Ice had started to build up, whitening the mustache and front of his chin. "Good to meet you, Terrence. What have you got?" A faint accent tinged his words.

"I saw the flash and punched in to 400 millimeters before it disappeared."

"Interesting," Professor Camden said. "Can you show us?" He gestured toward a laptop mounted next to the white cube.

Terrence plugged his card into the laptop's slot and opened the video. He moved the slider to the start of totality and let it play.

"It was over here," he said, pointing at the lower right.

At about fifteen seconds into totality, the tiny dot was barely visible, then slowly brightened. "Wow. Beautiful." Terrence's voice came through on the video, tinny in the laptop speakers. It brightened more, and after a few more seconds a quiet "Shit" could be heard. Terrence didn't even remember saying that.

The rest was familiar. The video jerkily panned, cropped, found the dot again, panned and zoomed, panned and zoomed.

The professor paused the video and scaled up the image. "It's one pixel."

"That doesn't look like an impact," Elise said.

"Doesn't it though?" Professor Camden leaned closer to the screen. "A small, high-velocity asteroid could do this." He raised his voice into the wind. "Owen, come take a look at this."

A soft-faced scientist came over, eyes narrowed. He looked at the screen without even glancing at Terrence.

"Nice footage. Looks pretty clean," he said. "Could be local though."

The professor turned to Terrence. "Where's your rig?"

"Down there, maybe thirty, thirty-five yards aft."

Professor Camden stroked his beard. “If that’s from thirty meters aft, then it’s a different angle. Lens ghost is looking harder to defend."

"It could still be a bright bead reflecting the same way in similar cameras," said Owen.

"That wouldn't survive zoom though," said Terrence.

Owen looked pointedly at Terrence. "It depends. What do you think it is?"

"No idea. Through my telescope, it looked like it was tracking with the Moon."

An icy gust of wind whipped past them, needling through seams and hoods.

Owen turned to Professor Camden. "If this is real, we should try to arrange observations down-track. As soon as possible."

Professor Camden nodded, his voice sharpening. "You're right. Okay, this is our priority now. We have to isolate locality. Evidence might decay fast, so let's move quickly. Can someone get a parallax analysis going on the footage? Keep the timestamps locked in, make it airtight."

"Sure,” Elise said. “Terrence, mind if we take your SD card?"

Terrence hesitated.

They're scientists. I can trust them.

“Sure,” he said.

She popped the card out of the laptop and walked down the bridge wing to where two more scientists were working.

"Let's generate more hypotheses," Professor Camden continued. "Owen, you have the list?"

Owen pulled a yellow notepad out of his jacket and held it up, pages flapping in the wind.

"Good. What have we got?"

Owen read from the pad, holding the pages tight. "H1: Satellite. Would show motion against the lunar silhouette. H2: Ice crystals. They'd drift in the atmosphere. And we can falsify ice crystals with parallax, since they’d be close. Umm… H3: Orbital debris. Harder because it might be far away. H4: Lunar surface dust plume. Would be diffuse instead of point-like. H5: Contemporaneous asteroid impact."

"An asteroid impact during the eclipse. That would be unusual," Camden said. "Whatever it is, it must be emissive."

Owen shook his head. “Something shiny in the umbra could still reflect earthshine."

Camden nodded. "That’s fair."

Elise was back. "They’re running the parallax. I had an idea. Could it be an image compression artifact?"

"Add it," Professor Camden said.

Owen scribbled on his pad. "H6: compression artifacts."

Camden raised an index finger inside his mitten. “Did we write down lens ghost?"

"I thought we eliminated that?" said Elise.

Camden shrugged. "Write them all down, even if we think they're eliminated."

Owen's pencil scraped on the pad. "H7: internal reflection."

Terrence was trying not to let his frustration show. "It wasn't the camera though. I even saw it through my telescope."

The PA interrupted the scientists' silent stares. "Ladies and gentlemen, the partial eclipse has now ended. We kindly ask that all guest equipment be removed from the open decks no later than 11:30 hours. After 12:00, the vessel will maneuver out of the ice field and return to open water. Thank you for your cooperation."

Kira.

"I know someone downstairs who got another angle. Two decks is what, twenty feet? That would add a third viewpoint."

"Okay, where is he?" said Owen, rubbing his nose with a gloved hand.

"She," corrected Terrence. "She's set up just outside the starboard deck door."

"Right, she. Let's go."

Kira was taking a panoramic selfie, bare-eyed now, when they arrived. "Still a mystery?" she said as she clipped her phone back in its mount.

"Not solved yet. Kira, this is Owen from the science team upstairs. They're doing an analysis to see how far away the object was." Terrence's voice brightened. "They're measuring how much the flash moves between the two viewpoints, then calc-"

"Parallax," she said, not waiting for his explanation. "It'll be noisy though. It's a point source so you'll be limited by sensor resolution, clock offset…"

Ugh. I just mansplained her.

She straightened slightly in the folding chair. "I can give you a copy, but I process it first."

Owen waved his hand dismissively. "Don't process anything. Just give us the original."

Kira shook her head. The hood on her jacket remained oddly still. Stiff in the cold. "Sorry, I follow my process. It'll only take a few minutes."

Owen's voice got sharper. "No, no. Don't apply filters. We can only use unprocessed originals. Any modification taints the result."

Kira stood up and faced Owen. Ice crunched under her boots. "I do not apply filters." The word "filters" was overpronounced, like it tasted bad. She punctuated it with an OK-sign jab. "I use RAW. That format gives me more of the sensor data. I keep the original intact, and apply a calibrated correction."

This is not going well.

Owen leaned in, about to speak, but Terrence cut in first. "How about we just observe your process, Kira? Does that work for you, Owen?"

Owen paused, looked at Terrence, then back at Kira. "Okay, but please narrate what you're doing." Owen took the phone from his pocket and pulled one thumb free of his glove to operate it.

"You don't have to take video. I'll get it all on my witness cam." She pointed at her phone, mounted and aimed at her rig, recording.

"I prefer to use mine," Owen said. He raised his phone, held it at chest height.

"Okay." Kira shrugged and slid back onto her seat. She reached out and with two fingers, nudged Owen’s phone up a few inches. Then she turned to it. "For provenance," she said to Owen's camera, yanking her face-warmer down for a blink, then up again without breaking cadence.

Terrence's attention had been on her other hand, on the way she'd just… moved Owen's phone up like that, for a better angle. When he looked up, the face-warmer was already back in place. He’d missed it.

As she worked, she pointed at each step like she was narrating a lab demo. "Stopping the main camera and rainbow camera. Power off, card out, write protect on."

She moved quickly. No wasted movements. She stopped the recording, thumbed the power switch at the bottom. The screen went dark. One hand went under the camera, palm up, as she eased the card out. She flipped the card's tiny lock tab with her maroon thumbnail, then held it up for both phones, pinched between leather-sheathed thumb and forefinger.

Who is she?

She did the same moves with the second, smaller camera, and continued to speak, staring straight into Owen's phone. "Nothing else gets written to this card. Next, I copy and verify."

Finally, she inserted the cards into a reader, and started typing into a terminal. "I run a secure hash manifest on the originals. Then I make two copies, one external, and hash those too. If even a single bit changes, we'll know." Text scrolled past, too fast for Terrence to follow.

She continued while it ran. "These are RAW files. That's just sensor data, defects and all. Hot pixels, dead pixels. Every sensor has them. Once this finishes, I'll run defect correction."

Terrence nodded. "What does that do?"

"It masks known bad pixels. If you want, we can look at it in the untouched RAW, and make sure the glint is there."

"Impressive," Terrence said. "Can you do mine too?" He thought he saw a smile tighten the corners of her eyes.

"Sure." Kira held out a hand.

"It's upstairs being analyzed, but I've got a copy on my laptop over there."

"Okay, this'll take a little while to run. Go get it."

Terrence trotted back over to his rig. The deck was noisy with conversation and the clatter of guests tearing down their kit. He checked his upload. Only 31% done. He dug out an empty card. Copied everything over. He hurried back, boots crunching on ice.

As he approached, Kira already had her phone out, pointing at him. "For provenance," she said, "this is Terrence bringing us his footage of the glint."

She held out her hand, palm up. "Don't drop it," she said quietly.

Terrence placed the card in Kira's hand. Her fingers closed over his before she slid the card free. She held it up for both cameras again. "Terrence's SD card with eclipse footage."

His attention caught on the way she’d said his name. He replayed it in his head, as if he hadn’t quite heard it. He had.

She was beckoning him over. When he stepped in beside her, she handed him the phone. "Here," she said, pointing at the screen. He started taking video while she inserted the card and typed in a command to kick it off. Text scrolled. "Okay, I'm done here. Let's bring this up?" She held up the drive with her processed files.

"Let's go," Terrence said. Owen put away his phone and Terrence swung the heavy metal door open, holding it for the others.

As the three of them crossed the bridge, the captain tracked them with his eyes, arms crossed.