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Old 05-05-2015, 07:07 PM
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andyc (Andy)
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Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: Sydney
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Successful observation

I managed to get an observation of this event - Europa became noticeably dimmer for a few minutes in the 16" scope. I took a series of photos through the event in my small scope, but they are fairly blurry and I'm not sure I'll make the effort of getting them ready for presentation. They do show a slight drop in magnitude (Europa dims a little, while Io and the others do not), but I only caught the end of the event on camera and it's pretty underwhelming image quality. But it qualifies as the first time I've seen a mutual satellite event!

Dean, it looks like Cartes du Ciel is incorrect. The event is listed in the tables here at the IMCCE (the premier group for observing these events it would appear) for 08:13-08:18 UTC, which was 18:13 to 18:18 Sydney time, 17:43-17:48 Adelaide time (start to end of penumbral phase). You can reach that page following instructions on this page, which has a lot of useful info and this IMCCE page has a link to description of the column headers. I had a situation earlier this year when I used Stellarium to try and observe an eclipse reappearance of Ganymede, and found I was looking at it 40 minutes too early... 40 minutes after Stellarium showed the reappearance, Ganymede popped out, which just happened to be the light-travel time from Jupiter to Earth! It sounds like CdC is out by more than that in this case, so there's a different issue, but I think it shows that some planetarium software isn't up to the task for these unusual events.
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