Occultation

Thanks for having me.

Well, I know that all of your work is dedicated to this idea of understanding small bodies in our solar system through stellar occultations.

How specifically do you have to be located and timed in order to actually see one of these stellar occultations for a trans-Neptunian object?

This was, uh, and, uh, is still one of the challenges, um, in predicting such stellar occultations by this very distant objects.

For example, the asteroids and the main belt asteroid, and the sizes are ranging from a couple of kilometers up to 910 or 1,000 kilometers.

So essentially, the width of the shadow path is, uh, in the same size, uh, like the size of the asteroid, the diameter of the asteroid.

If it has a satellite, a small moon, which was yet not discovered, it might happen by random that it also occults a star.

And then you can discover a satellite which you would never discover from Earth.

The Story of Eclipses by George Chambers.

Transits and Occultations.

No book professing to deal with eclipses would be complete without a few words of mention of transits and occultations.

A transit is the passing of a primary planet across the sun, or of a secondary planet, i.e. satellite, across its primary, whilst an occultation is the concealment of a star by the moon, or of a secondary planet, i.e. satellite, by its primary.

In point of fact, while the next three transits of Mercury are as remote as 1907, 1914, and 1924, there will be no transit of Venus at all during the 20th century, not another indeed until A.D. 2004.

From the standpoint of an amateur astronomer, the various phenomena which attend the movements of the satellites of Jupiter constitute an endless variety of interesting scenes, which are the most deserving of attention in that they can be followed with the aid of a telescope of very moderate size and capabilities.

Occultations of planets and stars by the moon may also be recommended to the notice of the owners of small telescopes, as events which are constantly happening and which may be readily observed.

The moon being rapidly in motion, it will happen in point of fact that stars are occulted by it.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Diana Schmidt Practical Talks by an Astronomer by Harold Jacoby Occultations Scarcely anyone can have watched the sky without noticing how different is the behavior of our moon from that of any other object we can see.

Of course, it has this in common with the sun and stars and planets that it rises in the eastern horizon, slowly climbs the dome of the sky, and again goes down and sets in the west.

This motion of the heavenly bodies is known to be an apparent one merely and caused by the turning of our own earth upon its axis.