The Occultation of Jupiter By the Moon: Feb. 18, 2013.

[Suzy]

Originally Posted by Suzy_A

Hmmm.... so today must be... ummmm... the 16th, so that means the Occ is on... Wednesday! OK, plenty of time.

So I better take the rubbish bin out. Funny, no one has taken their's out! Lazy beggars! (Glance up at the moon.)

OH CRAP!! IT's TONIGHT!!!

Race inside, grab the scope, still set up but cast aside in the middle of the lounge room from getting up at 2.30 am the other morning to have a look at some mythical asteroid. Grab the camera, head outside, the scope and camera seems very light - oh, the swarm of mozzies are almost lifting me off the ground. Bung the scope down, point it in the general direction. Here we go!

Too funny Suzy!
Have fun Boy you just got it in the nick of time by the sounds.

[mithrandir (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by Steffen

The gaps between clouds where large at times, so I dragged the camera outside and had a crack at it. This is the closest approach I could see, after that came the neighbour's roof…

I gave up from the back yard and went up to the top of my driveway. My version is a bit later than yours Steffen and is in another thread.

[azagil (Aaron)]

I had my scope all set up and ready with the reducer on, seen some great sights of the 2 through the eyepiece as they merged closer.....Then as I went in to get the camera set up to photograph it.....I lost all seeing due to cloud and the on going fires im my area...... I only managed one shot which I hope to post tonight once home (at work now)

[Tinderboxsky (Steve)]

We had good views here in southern Tassie. As others have commented, it is quite a sight to see the moon approach and then occult Jupiter and its moons.

I set up on the side of a country road not far from home that gave clear unobstructed views to the west. We had a clear warm night after a scorcher of a day. The moon was red from smoke haze and the seeing very turbulent.

I waited to see if I could view the re-emergence of Ganymede. At the scheduled time, the Moon was just starting to clip the tree line on the distant hills (approx 1 degree elevation). The seeing was probably too turbulent to see the moon even if it had commenced reappearing.

Interestingly whilst waiting, I was viewing Comet Lemon with 7X50 binoculars at about 11.30 pm when 2 satelites passed through field of view. They were approx 1 deg apart and one was following the other as they moved west to east. They were eventually lost in the haze toward the east.

Steve.

[Sarge (Rod)]

Melbourne West.
2200 hrs - perfectly clear skies, with a very warm breeze. Camera set up on the tripod, took a few testers to get exposure and focus right.
By 2300 smoke haze getting quite thick rolling in from the west. Lovely red moon, but not much help for an ocultation.
2315 - thick cloud total wipeout. No moon - no ocultation.

Well it is Melbourne.


Clear not skies

Rod

[dimma]

Tried to post a photo but can't figure it out

[Rob_K]

Originally Posted by dimma

Tried to post a photo but can't figure it out

Hi dimma. Scroll down from the reply box and hit the Manage Attachment button. That will open a form - select your image and click Upload.

Anyway, here's one of my shots, taken from about 10km west of Newstead in central Victoria. There was a bright orange "Bushfire Moon" but conditions were better than in Castlemaine where the Moon was red and at times Jupiter had been disappearing from naked eye view!

The image is a mosaic of several images taken with a Celestron NexImage through a 4.5" f8 reflector.

Cheers -

[Suzy_A]

Hmmm... can I post a video of the occulatation? I did 600 or so photos and assembled some into a WMV file. Can I post that? It looks like I can only do JPG etc and otehr still images.

[Rob_K]

Originally Posted by Suzy_A

Hmmm... can I post a video of the occulatation? I did 600 or so photos and assembled some into a WMV file. Can I post that? It looks like I can only do JPG etc and otehr still images.

Upload it to YouTube and post a link Suzy.

Cheers -

[Suzy_A]

Hi Everyone. I've done a quick and dirty AVI, but as the scope wasn't very well aligned (see my earlier post), the moon and Jupiter tends to jump and drift around a bit. Well, a lot then.

I'd like to do a good one - and that involves aligning each individual jpg. While the usual aligning software aligns - they also stacks the photos to make one individual final image - which is not what I want. I need to align the images to some reference point (eg, Jupiter at the centre of the image) and then save each individual image.

Does anyone know how to do this and what software will do it?