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Saturn's occultation March 2019
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  • Saturn's occultation by the moon on 29 March 2019

This was already the second Saturn occultation we could observe in Namibia. Pictures of the occultation of Saturn in 2014 are shown here



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29 March 2019 - Saturn's occultation by the moon in the morning sky

The close encounter of the Moon with Saturn on 29 March 2019, visible from Germany, could be observed from Namibia as Saturn occultation. The image on the right shows the imaging instrument, the Celestron C14 from Onjala Observatory.

Recording video module was a ZWO ASI 224C. Together with a Baader UV/IR pass filter the camera was used in the primary focus of the C 14 at f = 3.900mm focal length. The beginning of the occultation was at the bright moon limb with an illumination of about 40%. The exit was after sunrise and was therefore not observable.

All pictures can be enlarged by clicking on them..
The weather conditions were even worse than in 2014. the cloud cover was almost completely closed with haze clouds over it. after getting up early in the morning we thought for some time whether it would be worthwhile to open the dome at all and start the observation.

The picture on the left shows the cloud cover the next morning after sunrise and corresponds approximately to the conditions shortly before the beginning of Saturn's occultation. The following images are basically only available on 2 rawavifiles.






The two images below show on the left a single image from the raw avi, exposed on Saturn and on the right exposed on the moon limb.
 
 
          Moon and Saturn, Monday at 03:28:38 UT
 
Moon and Saturn, Monday at 03:30:48 UT          
In addition, there are avifiles of the individual occultation phases (tracking on sideral) with 300 single images each, 200 of which were added with registax. Even during these short time phases the moon moves so far that the moon's limb becomes blurred.

These files were only used to place the moon's limb geometrically at the right place during the 4 occultation phases. The two dark craters at the moon's limb are: Riccioli (small) and Grimaldi (large). The picture on the left shows 4 phases of Saturn's occultation at the times:


03:31:14 UT
03:31:39 UT
03:31:57 UT and 03:32:08 UT

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All Images and all Content are © by Wolfgang Paech + Franz Hofmann