Moon Occultation of Venus 19th Jun 9am-ish

[davhei]

Snapped this with mobile phone through the eyepiece, surprisingly good I thought considering. 
 

Was fairly easy to locate the pair in binos when I set up two hours before. When I tried again an hour or so later, I couldn’t find them. Luckily i kept tracking in my dob, nudging it every five minutes.

Magnificent event!

 

 

[bomberbaz]

I have the chap who was streaming it up on my FB account. He has stopped the stream but will be streaming the planet re-emerging. I will post a link up once he starts streaming again

[Stu]

No chance for me from here unfortunately, thanks for the amazing picture @davhei!

[Captain Scarlet]

Completely clouded over for the occultation, as per the pic below. But around an hour later I missed the actual re-emergence due to cloud but was unlucky, as there was more blue sky by then than cloud. It was interesting for a number of reasons:

- When using my (Baader V) RDF to try to line up on the Moon, I couldn't see it at all naked eye in a perfectly blue sky.

- When scanning the general area with 10x50 bins, I immediately found Venus, extremely prominent and a clear crescent. Even through the bins, and knowing exactly where it was, the Moon was barely evident.

- Locating Venus through the scope was a bit trickier, as my initial Solar Alignment was done approximately through cloud. So I used a trick that often works: slew away somewhat in a random direction, and re-request the hand controller to find the object. Sure enough, bright Venus shot past in the re-slew so I knew roughly where it was, and immediately found it at around 50x mag in the 6" Intes and 35 Panoptic.

- Venus was much bigger and much brighter than I was expecting. The Moon was barely visible. The two in the same FoV was magical though, as mentioned above, very "looming". I observed for a while but as the Sun stayed out, the view got worse and worse in wobbly heat haze.

Memorable.

 

 

Edited June 19, 2020 by Captain Magenta

[John]

Great image from @davhei - thanks for sharing your view of the event

Thick clouds and persistent rain here so nothing worth getting out of bed for

 

[maw lod qan]

I had thought the angles would be wrong here in Florida, and that turned out to be correct.

Then I hoped they would at least pass close enough to get both in the same image with prime focus. But clouds put and end to that.

Took this with my camera, handheld using 55mm.

[CentaurZ]

On 17/06/2020 at 06:22, lukebl said:

The forecast has now changed to cloudy!

It is amazing to live in a climate where it's still impossible to predict the weather more than two days ahead.

Yet this occultation was predicted quite precisely many decades ago. 🧐

Edited June 19, 2020 by CentaurZ