I had not realized the interest in the lunar occultation of Mars this past Monday until I received letters from Ottawa and Tokyo, incidentally 12 hours ahead of me - thanks, "Hagi"and your students for asking:
I am hard against our building to shelter me and the camera from a cold wind, stronger than a breeze. When I went out around 8PM/20:00 the Moon was clear and all was well. (Thanks for pointing out that I was "am" not "an" YH. And thanks for reading and writing, too. Make that "YH" - "萩原喜昭” ! )
However, when I returned to start the sequence of "ingression", it had so clouded up that I could not see even a hint of where the Moon might be. So I missed the start. And I was not optimistic about seeing the exit. But still I ought to try.
However, as you will note, I was several minutes late and the occultation was over. That is Mars above and to the right of the Moon;
I did some stretching of the intensity scale as well as colour - in that first shot of this sequence - to explore possibilities for another time. The last shot is close to what one would see through binoculars. I used my Nikon 1000 to take these images and Paint Shop Pro for "processing".
Thanks for spurring me on - WOB
We were at a dinner party with friends in our condo building. The conversation at the dinner table lasted more than 3 hours partly because some of our neighbors spend large parts of the year in Ethiopia, Australia, Arizona, California and British Columbia so such a gathering of these particular people at one time is rare and they have interesting perspectives to share.
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