{"id":681,"date":"2009-04-22T11:14:52","date_gmt":"2009-04-22T15:14:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=681"},"modified":"2009-04-22T11:14:52","modified_gmt":"2009-04-22T15:14:52","slug":"the-moon-eats-venus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=681","title":{"rendered":"The Moon Eats Venus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"occultation500wide.jpg\"I had a tough time sleeping after 4:30 AM this morning, probably because I slept so well the previous night. (The Powers seem to ration my sleep for reasons I’ve never understood. Maybe if I got a complete night’s sleep every night I’d be unbearably perky, like that retro 60s babe Flo on the Progressive Insurance commercials.) So I finally gave up about 5:15 and got dressed. I went out on the back deck to see what I could see of the Moon and Venus, to find that the positioning was optimal bad vis-a-vis the huge pine tree behind the house. My eastern horizon is very good, where I have an eastern horizon–and alas, the Moon was rising right behind the tree.<\/p>\n

However, by 6 AM the pair had cleared the tree, and were getting very<\/em> close. I put my Canon G-10 on its greatest zoom, propped the camera on the deck railing, and took some shots. The sky was getting pretty light at that point and I knew I wouldn’t get much contrast, but there’s something a little subtle and spooky about what I did get, and I’m quite happy with the shot overall. When I knew that the occultation was only a few minutes off, I went back in and got Carol up. We both watched it from the deck, passing my 8 X 50s back and forth and marvelling at the terrific weather.<\/p>\n

I haven’t seen a lot of planetary occultations, and there’s a fundamental difference between those of planets and stars: Stars are point sources of light. When a star goes behind the Moon, it blinks out instantly<\/em>. Planets fade as their disks are covered by the Moon’s limb over a period of a few minutes. As I watched Venus dim, I realized that this was the first planetary occultation I’ve watched through binoculars. Every other occasion (I think maybe three) I was watching through one of my big scopes. I regret a little not having put the 8″ scope on the back deck last night, but experience has shown that the deck is not a very steady platform for observing. (And the driveway looks west, with the house blocking the eastern horizon completely.) There’s something to be said for brand-new experiences. Why always do everything the same way?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had a tough time sleeping after 4:30 AM this morning, probably because I slept so well the previous night. (The Powers seem to ration my sleep for reasons I’ve never understood. Maybe if I got a complete night’s sleep every night I’d be unbearably perky, like that retro 60s babe Flo on the Progressive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[41],"class_list":["post-681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daybook","tag-astronomy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}