No, not that kind of occult. I’m talking about the celestial-body-blocking-something-else kind of occult.

Last night I was trying to get some photos of the moon when I noticed it was about to occult a bright star. Here it is blocking out Mu Ceti. These 1.3 second exposures are taken about 4 seconds apart.

I ended up overexposing too much, but I couldn’t see the star on the screen on the camera unless it was a longer exposure. I later noticed I could see it (especially if I bumped the highlights for that part of the picture) with a shorter exposure that also doesn’t give a star trails. Here is an image from earlier in the evening.

These kind of occultations used to be quite important for lunar studies to help astronomer’s map the mountains and valleys on the lunar surface with precise timing and viewed from different locations here on Earth.

I think I got the star starting to come out the other side an hour later, but the moon was getting low. One app showed that it should be visible, another didn’t, so I’m not sure. There is a speck that wasn’t there 10 minutes before. It is interesting to see the moon moving quickly against the background stars. The whole sky moves pretty slow, unless you looking through a telescope, and the moon doesn’t appear to move on it’s own until next to something else, like Mu Ceti.