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Re: Aldebaran occultation
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2017 Mar 5, 17:00 -0800
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2017 Mar 5, 17:00 -0800
On 2017-03-05 14:03, I wrote: > On 2017-03-04 22:48, Alexandre Eremenko wrote: >> The moment of disappearance I timed as March 5, 3:56:48 (GMT) >> >> 40d27.2'N, 86d55.8'W > > My Lunar4 program says Aldebaran is .02′ inside the Moon's limb at that > time. It puts the occultation 4 seconds earlier. The USNO MICA program agrees with Lunar4. Topocentric coordinates of both bodies from MICA: 267.63519° 61.59173° Moon az, ZD 267.71641° 61.33040° Aldebaran az, ZD That equals .27090° separation angle. MICA says semidiameter is 16′ 16.4″, which is .020′ greater than the separation angle. However, neither program accounts for the irregularities in the Moon's limb, which I believe are significant at this precision. My computational tools are not accurate enough to find any error in the observation by Alex.