xi-Leonis lunar graze from Greece - March 26th 2010

Hi all,

Two xi-Leonis lunar graze videos: Enjoy

Vagelis Tsamis

Yiannis Effremidis

LiMovie Plot:

Happy hour photo:

Dimitris Kapetanakis

On March 26th we had a grazing prediction path for xi-Leonis (by OCCULT4) and our team (6 people) set up our telescopes less than 50 meters from the grazing center line (google earth track).
We observed only one (!) gr. event - one D and one R. Duration 5.199 seconds +/- 0.04
2 observers were equiped with watec + gps and 4 observers made visual observation with reflector telescopes.
I used a 25 cm SCT telescope & GPS video time inserter & infrared Bessell (I) filter for my observation.
Both D & R were clearly not instant, but had duration of about 0.16 - 0.2 sec.

Visually, the view of the Moon and this spectral type K0 star with Kyriaki's 6" dob through a photometric Bessell (R) filter was magnificent!
I 've "redened" the first scenes in my video, just to get an idea of the visual view with the RED filter.

Another observer in Patra, Greece, 100 meters from the center line, observed visually 3 grazing events of xi-Leonis (3 Ds and 3 Rs)
Another observer in Kerkyra island, Greece, 9 km from the center line observed and recorded with watec/GPS an occultation event (D and R) - duration 5 minutes.

Greetings from Greece!
Vagelis Tsamis

Good work Vagelis!
How do you generate the chart of the lunar limb as in the first video?

Michael.

Hi Michael,

I used "Occult" software (freeware) www.lunar-occultations.com/iota/occult4.htm

Within Occult one can download the "Kaguya Hi-res data" and when making lunar predictions the program draws the Kaguya profile for the LON-LAT of the observation site. In my case, as you can see here we missed a second lunar mountain for a few hundred meters eg if we were ~500 meters inside the path, the star could blink twice or 3 times, etc.

Occult is also widely used for asteroidal occultation predictions.

Vagelis.