Mars occultation, and a lesson learned!

[Neil_104]

Here's one of my pics from the occultation on Thursday, this is the re-appearance. It's not the sharpest as by this stage the Moon & Mars were directly above a house and so affected by rising heat.

This was taken with a C6 and ZWO ASI 533MC-Pro at f/20.

I had planned on keeping things simple and just imaging the disappearance at f/10 and then viewing the re-appearance through the eyepiece, but I made the mistake of changing the plan at the last minute.... when taking my initial shots at f/10 as the Moon approached Mars, I decided I'd like to get a bit closer in on the action. So I grabbed a barlow and then fumbled about with cold fingers and a sleepy head to try to get it all connected (I suddenly needed to dig out an old 1.25" visual back instead of the 2" I was using initially). When I finally got it all set up, I looked at the laptop screen and Mars was...GONE! D'oh! 😫

So lesson learned - more planning and fewer impulsive decisions for the next event of this kind!

Anyways, I now had just under an hour to make sure I was pointing at the correct part of the Moon for the re-appearance. I made the decision not to change a thing, just WAIT 🙂

It's a shame I lost out on the steadier skies for the disappearance, but I'm still really pleased this. It made the 4:15am get up and -3C temps worth it for sure.

[CraigT82]

6 hours ago, Neil_104 said:

Here's one of my pics from the occultation on Thursday, this is the re-appearance. It's not the sharpest as by this stage the Moon & Mars were directly above a house and so affected by rising heat.

This was taken with a C6 and ZWO ASI 533MC-Pro at f/20.

I had planned on keeping things simple and just imaging the disappearance at f/10 and then viewing the re-appearance through the eyepiece, but I made the mistake of changing the plan at the last minute.... when taking my initial shots at f/10 as the Moon approached Mars, I decided I'd like to get a bit closer in on the action. So I grabbed a barlow and then fumbled about with cold fingers and a sleepy head to try to get it all connected (I suddenly needed to dig out an old 1.25" visual back instead of the 2" I was using initially). When I finally got it all set up, I looked at the laptop screen and Mars was...GONE! D'oh! 😫

So lesson learned - more planning and fewer impulsive decisions for the next event of this kind!

Anyways, I now had just under an hour to make sure I was pointing at the correct part of the Moon for the re-appearance. I made the decision not to change a thing, just WAIT 🙂

It's a shame I lost out on the steadier skies for the disappearance, but I'm still really pleased this. It made the 4:15am get up and -3C temps worth it for sure.

Very nice, was a great event 

Edited December 12, 2022 by CraigT82

[geoflewis]

Shame about the earlier muck up, but that's still an excellent record of the event.. I couldn't get the end of the occultation as the Moon and Mars would have behind trees by then, so I just went back to bed.