Saturn Occultation
By Bill Arnett

I saw it, too! From Fremont Peak. When I arrived just at sunset, it was foggy :-( But I decided to wait it out for a while and after an hour or so it cleared enough for me to set up. There were patchy clouds blowing by all night but only very briefly enough to actually obscure the Moon. It is amazing how well you can see it thru clouds. I never had any doubt after the fog cleared that I would see the occultation.

(BTW, it was incredibly wet. My scope was literally dripping; had to run my dew heater at 1/2 power all night. And windy and cold! By the time I left, there was frost on my car's roof! I even found a few patches of snow along the road. I hate winter :-( And the seeing was very bad. At times it was into the arc*minute* range, you could see the lunar craters swapping places with each other! Fortunately, that didn't matter much for this event.)

I had a lot of time on my hands. I was set up and ready to go by a little after 6pm and the occultation wasn't until 11:15. But I had cleverly brought my Rukl's Atlas of the Moon :-) So I alternated between crater hopping and sitting in my car warming up. I'm a complete beginner as far as lunar geography (selenography?) goes so I concentrated on the big easy stuff like Copernicus, Clavius and of course, Ptolemeaus. I saw a nice double sunrise ray in Palus Epidemiarum (you know the Marsh of Epidemics, love some of those names :-) It seems that sunrise/sunset rays are quite common. I think I've seen one about half the times I've looked at the Moon. Then I decided to track down the Apollo 11 landing site. Strange to gaze at that distant and alien landscape and think that men actually walked there. And so sad to think that it was more than 25 years ago with nothing since :-(

Of course, a big cloud covered the Moon just as the occultation was beginning. But all it did was dim the colors a little. After waiting all night it went by awfully fast! I missed seeing the leading Saturnian moons disappear (the cloud got them) but I did see the Moon cover Titan.

Then hang around for another hour for the reappearance. This time I tracked down a few easy things on the other limb where Saturn was to appear -- Mare Humboltianum, Endymium, Lacus Spei (Lake of Hope!). The binoviewer is really wonderful on the Moon. For the planets, its nice but kind of dim. But for the Moon it is like flying. Amazing.

Not having any choice about it, I had saved the best for last: the reappearance. Very cool to see the rings climb up above the limb. They appeared to be exactly vertical, It looked like a ghostly arch: (crude ascii diagram will need fixed width font):

                                                            A       <---
leading ansa
                                                          /  \
                                          xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
                 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx                                       Moon
xxxxxxxxxx

(Starry Night's rendition of this event is remarkably accurate. When I post this to the Web, I'll include a picture from Starry Night.)

Then Saturn's disk appeared making it look like a fat rocket blasting off. But "blasting" isn't right, it seemed to be more like antigravity, so slowly and silently lifting off and drifting into space. The illusion of lifting off was much more pronounced this time than when I saw the graze back in September.

As Robin said, it is cool to see them together and marvel at the screwed up scale. The apparently huge Moon is actually only 2/3 the size of Titan which appears as just a tiny dot; our Moon is only 3% of Saturn's diameter. To true scale, their apparent sizes would be reversed (approximately).

Packed up and was home by 2am (driving at only 3/4 impulse :-)