Occultations of stars by planets

[ricci]

A table with the occultations of stars by planets for the next years.

www.pierpaoloricci.it/dati/occultazioni pianeti-stelle fino alla 6 VERSIONE EN

[acey]

I'm interested to know how precession is accounted for in these calculations (given the finite distance of planets, as opposed to the effectively infinite distance of stars, and the resulting parallax one would expect to arise).

[661-pete]

I'm interested to know how precession is accounted for in these calculations (given the finite distance of planets, as opposed to the effectively infinite distance of stars, and the resulting parallax one would expect to arise).

Precession would only affect the RA and declination of the predicted event, not whether or not it would occur in the first place. It's only a change in the orientation of the Earth's axis, after all, not the Earth's position in the Solar system.

In the table, all RA/dec. data is given for epoch J2000, so if you want to be really precise you can apply date corrections to get the date RA/dec. But it won't matter for observing purposes.

The one on 1 Oct 2044* is of some interest, because the star being occulted is Regulus (this last happened in 1959 and was intensively studied). But, seeing as all the main planets have since been visited and closely studied by spacecraft, the scientific value of these events is probably far less significant.

Never forget, however, that it was by means of an occultation that Uranus's rings were first discovered.

I notice that Uranus and Neptune don't figure at all in the tables, and Saturn appears only once. This is presumably because they are very slow movers!

*I'm not likely to be around to see it!