Sighting in Avesnes-les-Aubert, February 1, 2025

At 8:28 p.m., the witness was parked on a small country road near the village. Using a smartphone, they took a time-lapse series of shots to photograph the Moon and the planet Venus. The sequence lasted about four minutes. The witness saw nothing with the naked eye: they only noticed a green crescent afterwards, while viewing their images, and its movement reminded them, in their words, of "the movement of a satellite." They had first considered that it might be an artefact of digital photography. They sent GEIPAN a still image taken from the sequence and the complete file, along with a completed technical questionnaire.

A Stellarium astronomical simulation confirmed that the Moon and Venus were both visible in the sky at that time. The testimony, although from a single witness, was rated as having good consistency. Analysis of the images with IPACO, GEIPAN's software, showed that the object was a lens reflection of the Moon inside the smartphone's lens. Such a reflection appears opposite the light source, mirrored through the optical centre of the lens, and a slight offset between the centre of the image and that optical centre was measured. In the video, the Moon and its reflection move together, and Venus also produces a reflection, though a fainter one. The separation is the same in both cases: 436 pixels. The crescent shape matches that of the Moon, which was 13.2% illuminated, and it is inverted, as expected for this kind of reflection. The green colour is consistent with the coating on the lens surface, although it is not known whether that is the case for this particular model.

GEIPAN classified the case as A: a lens-reflection artefact produced by the camera.