Jupiter Occultation, 26-March-2005

The occultation of Jupiter has now occured and below is the first image we have acquired from the event.

	Jupiter approaching The Moon, this is before first contact. The poor image quality is due to cloud and associated effects. Click here to view full sized image
	This is the first image I have from the Occultation. Conditions were very poor with heavy cloud and extremely bad atmospheric turbulence. This makes for a very difficult photography situation. Click here to view full sized image
	Jupiter re-appearing from behind The Moon. Click here to view full sized image
	Jupiter is now clear of The Moon, the event is over. Click here to view full sized image

Event Details

An occultation of Jupiter by the Moon will occur on the 26th March 2005. This event will be visible to those in the southern hemisphere, in particular the south of Australia.

Living in Perth, Western Australia I have compiled a set of images representing the expected path of the occultation. This will hopefully help those who are planning to view or photograph the event and don't necessarily have access to accurate plotting tools.

Photographing the Occultation

There are many ways to photograph the occultation and without a doubt the best way is the way you are most familiar with, are capable of or find easiest. However, the preferred method will be the use of Webcam Astrophotography. Other preferable options are:

• Prime focus film exposures
• Prime focus webcam
• A-focal prime focus with your hand-held digital camera.

Using prime focus film exposures you will want to check what exposure time you should use with your telescope/lens + camera combination. To do this a good tool is the exposure calculator by Michael Covington (available from http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/astro/astrosoft.html). Having calculated the expected exposure times you will want to bracket each shot by a couple of stops - that is, take 3 shots instead of 1 for each photo. One should be slightly under exposed, one should be the expected correct exposure and the other should be slightly over exposed. Print film is most suitable in this case as it has handles a larger range of exposure than slide film. Depending upon the F-stop you will be working at, try to keep the film speed down (100ASA - 400ASA) as this will give you a greater quality final print. Personally I would choose a good quality 200ASA print film (Fuji Superia 200, perhaps or Fuji NPC 160).

Using a Webam you would be looking to take a series of relatively short video's to capture the event without either the Moon or Jupiter blurring (moving) in your final stacked image. Alternatively if you have the disk space you could record a wide range of time and cut the video in to segments as required later in processing.

For A-Focal photography simply hold the camera up to the eyepiece. This can take a little practice but once you know the right combination of eyepiece & camera settings for your setup you can achieve quite respectable results from this method of photography.

Finding the Occultation

Viewing the occultation is extremely easy because of the easy-to-find Moon & Jupiter. However timing is critical so you may find the following images of use.

Prediction images above were produced using TheSky v4 by Software Bisque.

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