On 1/26/12 2:55 PM, Jim Palfreyman wrote:
As a reasonably experienced occultation observer (and the very reason I got into being a time-nut - so I could time these observations), the main problem is that the number of binocular-observable occultations is actually quite rare. When the star appears or disappears behind the bright limb it is actually hard to see - even if the star is very bright. When the moon is nearly full, even disappearances behind the dark limb are hard.
Yes, that's what I observed when I was trying it a while ago..
So ideally you want bright star disappearences on a dark limb with a moon before first quarter. (Last quarter as well - but then it's a reappearance and you don't quite know where to look).
that would sort of limit you to 1 week out of 4. But better than nothing, for a technique that requires no outside assistance.
This limits the number of bright stars quite drastically. And then you have clouds...
Yeah, that is something I don't have a feel for.. How many stars are candidates? I assume you could get a moon RA/declination list, and then run that against the star list.
This is one of those things that I was hoping there's probably someone who has a program that can do the search trivially.
I have a moon ephemeris, but I haven't found a convenient star catalog (something in ASCII that has ID, RA, Dec, Mag would be nice)
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