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Peter,

1. Why do you call moonshine "earthshine"?

2. A 3 sm telescope should have the same effect as my binocular: it will make the star bright enough
to be visible at the time of occultation.
I was interested whether people could observe this before the spread of telescopes.
We have records of occultations since antiquity.
I am curious how they did this.

Alex.
________________________________________
From: NavList@fer3.com [NavList@fer3.com] on behalf of Peter Monta [NoReply_PeterMonta@fer3.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 5, 2017 11:18 PM
To: eremenko@math.purdue.edu
Subject: [NavList] Re: Aldebaran occultation

Hi Alex,


Binoculars (or "night glasses" are relatively recent invention, 18 century or so).
Could people use this method in the earlier times by somehow obscuring (shielding) the Moon?

I don't know, but that would certainly be a reasonable thing to do.  It's not 
quite the same issue, but I saw the occultation using a telescope, and one 
thing that really helped with the earthshine is to keep the bright Moon out 
of the eyepiece's field of view.  That way the earthshine was actually 
visible and I could give confident estimates of the time remaining to the 
rest of the group.

No way I could do naked eye, but my brother could, all the way to the event.  
The rest were on binoculars.

I too would like a convenient, and preferably open-source, tool for really 
first-class computation of these things.  Apparently the lunar occultation 
community has one, but it's Windows, so I didn't quite have time to get it up 
and running.  Also it's not clear exactly how it does the lunar topography, 
but the ephemeris stuff sounded okay (DExxx).

Cheers,
Peter

   

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