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Re: Aldebaran occultation
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2017 Mar 5, 20:39 -0500
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2017 Mar 5, 20:39 -0500
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
