composite image by Pete Lawrence, Selsey, England.
In England on March 2nd, 2007 the Moon slowly moved past Saturn. From Pete’s observing site in Selsey the Moon just barely nicked the planet itself but pleasingly covered about 40% of the rings. Here are Pete’s words on how he captured this event: The difference in brightness of the Moon compared to Saturn was huge at the time and in order to get both objects imaged simultaneously, one must suffer. In this case I exposed correctly for Saturn which meant that the Moon’s limb was burnt out. A number of shots were taken at 30s intervals (10s movie captures at 60fps, fixed on Saturn) which gave me the positional information I needed to build the composite you see here. The RGB image of Saturn was captured just before the occultation and the lunar limb just after (this is a three frame mosaic). The interval positions shown are separated by 90s in time. South is up in the image and the Moon would be moving towards the upper right.
Pete Lawrence
Technical Details:
March 2, 2007, maximum coverage for Pete at 02h52m UT. C-14 (14″ SCT) at prime focus (f/11) + Lumenera SKYnyx 2-0 camera.
Related links:
Pete’s spectacular web site
COMMENTS?
Register, and click on the Discussion tab at the top of the page.
