Lunar Occultation of Uranus

by
Mike Rupe
Bill Arnett
Allan Keller
Rich Neuschaefer

22:23:10 PDT Mike Rupe

Anyone out there watching tonights occultation of Uranus, I could see it just go behind the moon about 10:07. I think it will reapear about 10:45, I'm in Cupertino, Ca.

22:27:16 PDT Bill Arnett

Yeah, kewl :-) Not as good as Saturn a couple years ago, though :-) When do we get Jupiter? I'll be watching [for the reappearance]. Look in the southern part of Mare Humboltianum, just to the limb from Endymion. I'm in Redwood City.

22:55:11 PDT Mike Rupe

Saw it reappear about 10:50. Bill, you're right, it wasn't much, but at least I could check my software by it. And I guess I can say I saw it anyway. Now on to bigger and better things.

00:00:34 PDT Bill Arnett

? I thought it was great fun. Now one of my long term projects is to observe as many lunar occultations of the planets as possible. Two down, 6 to go :-) (I don't think I'll ever get a chance to see the Moon occult the Earth :-(

23:24:26 PDT Allan Keller

Thanks for the reminder guys. I forgot and missed it at 10:07 but I saw it reappear at about 10:47 here in Roseville. Tracked it with Starry Night Pro. Terrible smoke in the air, Moon is pale orange color!

23:36:24 PDT Rich Neuschaefer

I watched from slightly south of Cupertino and Uranus winked out about 11:10 pm PDT.

If I was looking at the right object. The northern limb of the Moon passed in front of a "star" (Uranus?).

I was using about 90x. The 92.5 mm f/4.9 AP Stowaway, a 10 mm Zeiss abbe ortho and a 2x barlow.

ps I didn't think I would up this late.

23:41:06 PDT Rich Neuschaefer

Ok, so which star did I see get run over by the Moon? I guess I was way to late to see the Uranus event.

23:58:11 PDT Bill Arnett

It was a nice evening here. But I was a little disappointed with Starry Night Pro. It predicted the reappearance point on the lunar surface off by a few degrees of lunar latitude ;-)

00:13:52 PDT Rich Neuschaefer

Any idea which star I saw occulted? It "hit the Moon" about 11:10 pm on it's northern limb.

00:23:00 PDT Bill Arnett

Starry Night Pro refers to it as "HIP 103920" (the Hipparcos catalog); mag 7.43.

00:51:06 PDT Rich Neuschaefer

Thanks Bill! So why weren't the rest of you tracking that one? ;-) It was almost a graze from my postion.

02:13:19 PDT Allan Keller

I don't know if it was off by a few degrees of lunar latitude or not. I had my LX200 set up earlier, read Mike and your posts, ran outside, slewed it to Uranus, saw that Starry Night Pro showed that it was about to reappear, watched, saw it, noted the time and smiled. Perhaps the credit for accuracy should go to the LX200. :-) It is interesting to note that the graze of Theta Capricorni (magnitude 4.1) at 0:47 am in San Jose was a total miss here in Roseville according to Starry Night Pro. It was too low for me to see with my scope.