Observed the Moon's occultation of the star Eta Geminorum last night.
Based on my SkyMap Pro software, I noted that this would occur around
10:30pm DST.
At about 9:17pm I used an 18mm ep for a magnification of 111X and
placed only the area of the moon illuminated by earthshine in my field
of view. It was easy to see faint outlines of the Plato and Kepler
craters, as well as Mares.
I had just finished a fine tuning on my collimation, so the Moon's
outline and the stars were very sharp. That's when I noted a few more
stars about to be occulted by the Moon before the target star. In
the 20 minutes I observed, I noted four occultations. Here are the
data on these stars and the times (rounded off to the nearest minute)
of these occultations.
Star Magnitude R.A. Dec Occultation
GSC-1326-0951 mag=9.77 06h 14m 20.54s +22¡ã 14' 25.2" 10:20pm
GSC-1326-0667 mag=9.22 06h 14m 40.71s +22¡ã 21' 00.4" 10:22pm
GSC-1326-0577 mag=9.94 06h 14m 50.42s +22¡ã 28' 58.3" 10:28pm
Propus EtaGem mag=3.28 06h 14m 55.36s +22¡ã 30' 21.5" 10:32pm
Just to say that I really enjoyed the view and that observing stars
coming in on the non-illuminated limb permits much fainter stars to be
seen, since the Moon's glare does not interfere. Fun!
PhotonMan
