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Old 25-12-2015, 09:37 PM
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skysurfer
Dark sky rules !

skysurfer is offline
 
Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: 33S 150E (AU holiday)
Posts: 1,181
Aldebaran occultation (made a video)

Last Wednesday I saw an occultation of Aldebaran and I filmed it with the Canon Powershot S100 attached with a PVC tube adapter behind the Nagler 13T6 eyepiece in an ED110 f/7 (M=59x) refractor.
I tried to film the disappearence at 18:12 UTC, but I was too late. Here I filmed the reappearance at 19:15 UTC.

http://skysurfer.eu/jwplayer/video.p...MubXA0Ojo6NjAw

I had luck with the weather in the usually cloudy Netherlands. There were three occultations visible (Sep 5 , Oct 29 and Dec 23) of which I could see two (first and last). I took pictures on Sep 5 as well just at sunrise time (5:00 UTC), the reappearence of Sep 5 was behind clouds.

For Oz (and the whole southern hemisphere), you are unlucky: an occultation of Aldebaran will NEVER happen. That is due to that Aldebaran is too far south of the ecliptic which results in the Moon passing too far north. But next year an occultation series of another bright star begins : Regulus, which can be spread all over the world.

Here an overview of the visibility areas of the Aldebaran occultations 2015-2018:
http://pix.skysurfer.eu/Aldebaran-2015-2018.png

And here Regulus:
http://pix.skysurfer.eu/Regulus-2017.png

These maps can be plotted by the freeware offline app Occult 4.

See my pics:

http://skysurfer.eu/planets.php
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