Download Occult4 by Dave Herald. You can list off all Lunar Occultations for your location and choose a minimum magnitude to show. Start at 3.0, but probably 2.0 or above is a binocular viewing - depending on your skies.
Note that Occult4 is an extensive piece of astronomical software for the experienced amateur. It can do a *lot*. So be prepared to be patient with it - however once mastered it is very very useful for accurate timing of astronomical events. The hardest and yet most satisfying for astronomical time nuts are asteroidal occultations. This is where a faint asteroid passes in front of a star and blocks it out for a few seconds. Hard to accurately predict and hard to observe. It took me 40 attempts over 30 years to see my first. But when a bunch of amateur astronomers observe and accurately time the same event you can build up a profile of the shape of the asteroid. It is a fun but dark path to go down... Jim On 27 January 2012 11:35, Jim Lux <jim...@earthlink.net> wrote: > 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) > > > > > ______________________________**_________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com > To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/** > mailman/listinfo/time-nuts<https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts> > and follow the instructions there. > _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.