Virtual Star Party: Occultation of Mars by the Moon

On Wednesday, December 7th at 6:30pm (Pacific Standard Time) the Moon, as seen from North America, passed in front of the planet Mars, emerging about an hour later. Carnegie and Mount Wilson astronomers hosted a live-stream of the event from Mount Wilson Observatory using a variety of telescopes. This is recording of the event with some cleaning up of the audio/video and time indexes.

00:03:07 – Moon and Mars
00:12:55 – Occultation begins (ingress)
00:14:31 – The 60-inch telescope
00:18:30 – Jupiter
00:26:00 – Tower-cam and slewing to Saturn
00:31:35 – Saturn
00:44:57 – 60-inch eyepiece, the Nicholson list, and telescope configurations
00:49:46 – The Blue Snowball (NGC 7662)
00:58:44 – Richard’s refractor and M15
01:06:44 – Back to the Moon (at the position of Mars)
01:12:49 – Occultation ends (egress) – Mars “rises” above the limb of the Moon
01:21:13 – Visualizing the orbits of Mars and the Moon – why do occultations happen?
01:25:23 – Back to Mars
01:29:46 – Sign off, and closing up for the night

The broadcast of this event was made possible by:
Carnegie Institution for Science: https://carnegiescience.edu (Drs. Chris Burns and Jeff Rich)
Mount Wilson Observatory: https://mtwilson.edu (Tom Meneghini and Richard Bell)
Glendale Community College: https://www.glendale.edu (Prof. Jennifer Krestow)